In the Netherlands municipalities have been collaborating for years already to build an open source ecosystem: https://commonground.nl/
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
The way they go about this is still a bit weird / government like. Individual municipalities write tenders for software companies to contribute to these projects. The Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeente is hosting the specific committees that are in charge of product vision / architecture. But I am not sure if there is a way for individuals to contribute to these projects right now. So the source is Open Source, the process very much not yet.
If you are Dutch and looking to work on awesome gov-tech send me a DM.
This heavily depends on which part of policies you take into account. Many European countries are shifting to the right concerning migration. But when looking at the fiscal / economic policies of for example the PVV in the Netherlands (the far-right party of Geert Wilders) you will find that those policies are very comparable to left-wing parties.
This actually became very obvious 3 weeks ago, when a majority of employers shut down their work from home services because of the Citrix Netscaler vulnerability.
There were major traffic jams the following Monday morning which were aptly named "Citrix Jams" on the news.
Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.
Not only the traffic jams where a problem. Some companies are so forward with working remote they've abolished the concept of a personal workspace/desk for every employee and only have 'flex' workspaces which are shared among all workers (higher ups excluded of course, do as I say, don't do as I do...). So in the morning you never know which desk you'll end up with and if you even sit close to your teammates. The flex spaces (along with the parking spaces) are calculated to the average amount of employees to be expected to work in the office, not the maximum capacity. So you can imagine how productive that monday was.
Flex workspaces predate WFH as a trend. It originated among salespeople and other departments where employees are not actually “in” most of the time - someone figured out they could cut on office costs by reducing “wasted” space. Similarly to open-space modes, hotdesks were then extended to a lot of other places where they didn’t belong, and here we are. I know of entire buildings where people are effectively forced to get to the office horribly early just to ensure they have a decent desk close to their colleagues.
It's weird, my girlfriend works for a water board (keeping our feet dry, the fish wet and crops & nature just wet enough), the have this too. To make things worse, between christmas and new years, the office is closed as lots of people take up vacation days but if you don't you're still expected to work.
But the security checks are a bitch though and there tend to be long queues especially during business flight hours. In general you want to be about 30-45 minutes at the airport before your flight.
And the lights are dimmed on a nighttime takeoff/landing so that, in the event of needing to evacuate, your eyes don't need to adjust as much as when going from very bright to very dim.
I can read pretty quickly (I've never really measured, but it takes me about a minute to read a page, which I guess is around 500 words). Depending on the text, though, there's a lot of slowing down or re-reading. I read Harry Potter pretty quickly, but "Thinking: Fast and Slow" is nowhere near at the same pace.
Yes, a lot of times speeds keep on varying. It depends a lot on the type of book that you're reading. For the rest, it's inherent abilities that assist.
I have had a few workshops on speed reading at my university, and what those guys said about subvocalization was something along the lines of:
We learn to read when we are about 6 years old, how do we learn this? By sitting in a classroom and reading out aloud a simple text, with the entire class at once. In this stage we start to connect reading with subvocalization, when we learn to read better the teacher tells us to 'read in our heads'. Meaning that you are still sub vocalizing. This is a limiting factor as one can (presumably) only speak around a maximum of 500-600 words per minute. Coincidentally, this is the maximum speed for which we can read with a high comprehension according to skeptoid.
I personally never thought much of the guys giving the speedreading workshops, they seemed to be acting and came across like secondhand car dealers. Their claims of comprehension with over 1500 words / minute just sound insane. The techniques however are not all nonsense, and I do believe that I have learned to increase my reading speed from +/- 300 to around 500 words per minute.
The most important lesson they thought was 'guiding your eyes'. Our eyes are not that good in following a straight line by themselves, just try to stare straightforward, and make a perfect circle with your eyes: it will more likely be a pentagon or something. When we let our eyes follow our finger drawing a circle however, it is a lot easier. Applying this to reading, simply means using your finger or pen to follow each sentence on the paper. I find it a lot faster to read that way, but I still let myself subvocalize the sentences, for comprehension. Doing this on a 500-600 words/minute rate is a lot more exhausting though, and I only use it for academic articles or textbooks.
I am currently doing my bachelor thesis, and a part of my theoretical framework addresses these two kinds of shoppers. There is actually quite some academic research on the subject.
According to Swanson (1992) gratification can be categorized in two dimensions: process and content. Process gratification refers to the enjoyment and satisfaction from engaging in communication, content gratification refers to learning information from media content. In other words, motivations such as entertainment, relaxation, escape or just passing time are related to process gratifications (Parker and Plank, 2000). On the other hand information, cognitive and search motives are linked to content gratifications (Stafford and Stafford, 2001; Charney and Greenberg, 2002).
Other studies related to consumer behavior have identified two types of behavior as well. Much like content gratification, utilitarian motives are related to problem solving, goal oriented, task related and rational (Batra and Ahtola, 1991; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2001). Contrasting hedonic motives can be compared to process gratification. Hedonic motives are often driven by such things as fun, amusement, enjoyment, arousal, novelty and surprise (Hirschman, 1980; Babin et al. 1994; Hausman, 2000).
Simply put, utilitarian shoppers are those with a purchasing goal, while hedonic shoppers fulfill their needs not simply through the purchase, but in the shopping experience itself (Arnold and Reynolds, 2003). Hedonic shoppers are shopping for shopping sake.
Digging into research on the effect of web aesthetics on buying decisions of consumers, a case can be made for two aspects of aesthetics: aesthetic appeal and aesthetic formality. Aesthetic appeal refers to the attractiveness and creativity of design, while aesthetic formality covers the way information is presented, the clearness and legibility of a website (Schenkman and Jonsson, 2000; Lavie and Tractinsky, 2004).
Now combining these two types of consumers and two aspects of aesthetics, we can argue that the utilitarian shopper is highly motivated by aesthetic formality. He will be more likely to make a purchase when he is not distracted by novel design, and is able to find all the information he needs easily. Hedonic shoppers o the other hand are motivated by aesthetic appeal, and are more likely to make impulse purchases on a website with a high appeal (Constantinides, 2004; Kim and Eastin, 2011; Wang et al 2011).
Now Pinterest is a website typically for hedonic shoppers, and the aesthetic balance is heavily biased towards aesthetic appeal. While a website like apple.com where we can expect shoppers of both types is far more balanced in its aesthetic. On the other end of the scale we can put sites like Craigslist or maybe Ryanair, which you will only visit if you have a certain goal. These sites have an extensive amount of aesthetic formality, and little to no aesthetic appeal.
I will not list the entire list of literature in this post, you should be able to find it on scholar with the authors and year. Just send me a message if you would like to receive the list of articles.
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.