A welcome policy can be embedded in a municipal authority organisation in a number of different ways. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. To be effective, the local policy makers must be clear on how they hope to make use of the welcome policy and how this will benefit or suffer from different organisational structures. No one ‘ideal’ structure will ‘fit’ all municipal situations in Europe. However, to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the organisational structure that most closely resembles the local situation can increase the chances of successful policy implementation.
A welcome policy can be embedded in a municipal authority organisation in a number of different ways. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. To be effective, the local policy makers must be clear on how they hope to make use of the welcome policy and how this will benefit or suffer from different organisational structures. No one ‘ideal’ structure will ‘fit’ all municipal situations in Europe. However, to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the organisational structure that most closely resembles the local situation can increase the chances of successful policy implementation.
Abstract To add value to the organization, an Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) function should be able to realize its goals in line with the corporate strategy. In this paper *, we propose the Enterprise Architecture Realization Scorecard (EARS) and an accompanying method to discover the strengths and weaknesses in the realization process of an EAM function. During an assessment, representative EA goals are selected, and for each goal, the results, delivered during the different stages of the realization process, are identified, examined and scored. The outcome of an assessment is a numerical EARScorecard, supplemented with a description of the strengths and weaknesses of the EA realization process, and recommendations. To evaluate and improve the assessment instrument, the EARScorecard was used in various organizations. An assessment case is discussed in depth to illustrate the use of the instrument.
Everyone has the right to participate in society to the best of their ability. This right also applies to people with a visual impairment, in combination with a severe or profound intellectual and possibly motor disability (VISPIMD). However, due to their limitations, for their participation these people are often highly dependent on those around them, such as family members andhealthcare professionals. They determine how people with VISPIMD participate and to what extent. To optimize this support, they must have a good understanding of what people with disabilities can still do with their remaining vision.It is currently difficult to gain insight into the visual abilities of people with disabilities, especially those with VISPIMD. As a professional said, "Everything we can think of or develop to assess the functional vision of this vulnerable group will help improve our understanding and thus our ability to support them. Now, we are more or less guessing about what they can see.Moreover, what little we know about their vision is hard to communicate to other professionals”. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can provide insight into the functional vision of people with VISPIMD, in order to predict their options in daily life situations. This is crucial knowledge to ensure that these people can participate in society to their fullest extent.What makes it so difficult to get this insight at the moment? Visual impairments can be caused by a range of eye or brain disorders and can manifest in various ways. While we understand fairly well how low vision affects a person's abilities on relatively simple visual tasks, it is much more difficult to predict this in more complex dynamic everyday situations such asfinding your way or moving around during daily activities. This is because, among other things, conventional ophthalmic tests provide little information about what people can do with their remaining vision in everyday life (i.e., their functional vision).An additional problem in assessing vision in people with intellectual disabilities is that many conventional tests are difficult to perform or are too fatiguing, resulting in either no or the wrong information. In addition to their visual impairment, there is also a very serious intellectual disability (possibly combined with a motor impairment), which makes it even more complex to assesstheir functional vision. Due to the interplay between their visual, intellectual, and motor disabilities, it is almost impossible to determine whether persons are unable to perform an activity because they do not see it, do not notice it, do not understand it, cannot communicate about it, or are not able to move their head towards the stimulus due to motor disabilities.Although an expert professional can make a reasonable estimate of the functional possibilities through long-term and careful observation, the time and correct measurement data are usually lacking to find out the required information. So far, it is insufficiently clear what people with VZEVMB provoke to see and what they see exactly.Our goal with this project is to improve the understanding of the visual capabilities of people with VISPIMD. This then makes it possible to also improve the support for participation of the target group. We want to achieve this goal by developing and, in pilot form, testing a new combination of measurement and analysis methods - primarily based on eye movement registration -to determine the functional vision of people with VISPIMD. Our goal is to systematically determine what someone is responding to (“what”), where it may be (“where”), and how much time that response will take (“when”). When developing methods, we take the possibilities and preferences of the person in question as a starting point in relation to the technological possibilities.Because existing technological methods were originally developed for a different purpose, this partly requires adaptation to the possibilities of the target group.The concrete end product of our pilot will be a manual with an overview of available technological methods (as well as the methods themselves) for assessing functional vision, linked to the specific characteristics of the target group in the cognitive, motor area: 'Given that a client has this (estimated) combination of limitations (cognitive, motor and attention, time in whichsomeone can concentrate), the order of assessments is as follows:' followed by a description of the methods. We will also report on our findings in a workshop for professionals, a Dutch-language article and at least two scientific articles. This project is executed in the line: “I am seen; with all my strengths and limitations”. During the project, we closely collaborate with relevant stakeholders, i.e. the professionals with specific expertise working with the target group, family members of the persons with VISPIMD, and persons experiencing a visual impairment (‘experience experts’).
The global market for the industrial manufacturing of recombinant proteins (RPS) is steadily increasing and demand will keep rising in years to come. Currently, RPs are already an integral part of disease therapeutics, agriculture and the chemical industry and RP manufacturing methods rely heavily on host systems such as prokaryotes and, to a lesser extent, mammalian, yeast and plant cells. When comparing these host systems, all have their specific strengths and weaknesses and numerous challenges remain to improve protein manufacturing on an industrial scale. In this project, GLO Biotics proposes an innovative plant-based RP expression platform with the potential of significantly reducing costs and process requirements compared to the current state-of-the-art systems. Specifically, this novel concept is based on the use of coconut water as a natural, cell-free ‘protein production factory’. Coconut water in nuts aged 4-6 months is composed of free-floating cell nuclei devoid of cell walls, and it has been demonstrated these nuclei can express foreign proteins. Compared to existing platforms, the relative ease of delivering foreign protein-coding genes into this system, as well as the ease of recovery of the produced protein, potentially offers an innovative platform with great commercial attractiveness. In summary, the aim of this project is to provide a proof-of-concept for coconut water as a novel and competitive RP production platform by demonstrating the production and recovery of several commercially available RPs. To this end, GLO Biotics intends to collaborate with Zuyd University of Applied Sciences (Zuyd) and the Aachen Maastricht Institute for Biobased Materials (AMIBM) in demonstrating the potential of the ‘GLO-Conuts’ expression system. As a consortium, Zuyd and GLO Biotics will utilize their shared experience in molecular engineering and DNA vector technology and AMIBM will bring their expertise in plant-based RP production and recovery.
The growing awareness of consumers of the increasing problem with livestock and meat production due to the high nitrogen emissions and the related impact on climate change drives consumption of plant based vegetarian alternatives. Similarly there is also an increasing demand for animal-free, eco-friendly alternative vegan leather. Consequently there has been significant interest in developing leather-like vegan materials from multiple plant sources, such as mango, pineapple and mushroom based materials. However, the commercialization and the growth of sustainable vegan leather production is hampered significantly by the difficulty of achieving the needed quality for the various consumer products as well as the high prices of the vegan alternatives. In the Growing Leather project two SMEs, BioscienZ and B4Plastics, will combine forces with Avans University of Applied Sciences to develop vegan leather from the mushroom based material called mycelium. BioScienZ is a biotech company with strong expertise and capacity to produce low-cost and consistent quality mycelium. B4Plastics is a material development company, with strengths in designing and distributing eco-plastic products. In this project Avans University will use several mycelium types (produced by BioscienZ), and with the guidance of B4Plastics, it will test various additives under many different conditions, to ultimately develop an environmentally friendly, vegan material that will have comparable material characteristics to animal leather and is competitive in price.
