{"id":5992,"date":"2010-06-19T02:11:55","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T00:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.world-citizenship.org\/?p=5992"},"modified":"2025-02-11T14:51:54","modified_gmt":"2025-02-11T13:51:54","slug":"expatica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/?p=5992","title":{"rendered":"Expatica"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Expatica is the international community\u2019s home away from home on the web. It is a must-read for English-speaking expatriates and internationals across Europe. Expatica provides a tailored local news service and essential information on living in, working in or moving to your country of choice. With in-depth features, Expatica brings the international community closer together &#8230; (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.expatica.com\/\">about, left down on the Frontpage<\/a>).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Issues<\/strong>: Mainmenu on the Frontpage for: Moving, Housing, Employment, Health &amp; Fitness, Eduication, Finance &amp; Business, Leisure, Family &amp; Kids, Expat Life, News, Forums &amp; Connect, More &#8230; infos are not concerning a specific country;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Country links<\/strong> for Belgium, France, Germany, Lucembourg, Moscow, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, United Kingdom. When you choose a country, all Issues appearing in the left column become infos concerning this specific country.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Contact online<\/strong>. When clicking the contact-link down of each page, appears automatically the EXPATICA contact-URL <em>of the country where you are living in<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.expatica.com\/popup\/the_expatica_story.html\">The Expatica Story<\/a>: Canadian expat Bram Lebo wondered what was going on. He had been waiting at the tram stop for more than half an hour and still no sign of a tram. In fact, the stop was ominously empty that Monday morning in early 2000 and the only other people waiting seemed to be foreigners like him; they weren\u2019t speaking Dutch anyhow. If only he had known \u2013 like half of Holland did\u2013 that public transport workers were on strike that day.\u00a0\u00a0 <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>A local might have warned him that a bicycle was his best chance to arrive at his destination. But since his Dutch wasn\u2019t good enough to understand local radio or read Dutch newspapers, he was left in the dark.<\/p>\n<p>Afterwards, Lebo saw the need to set up a Dutch news and information service in English and by March 2000, he had put theory into practice. Bram chose an online medium so that anyone anywhere could access the service, and for free.<\/p>\n<p>Dutch entrepreneur Mark Welling had been working on a similar idea. He had been running a company specialising in building websites since 1998. The Internet was on the rise and many still didn\u2019t realise the impact that this medium was going to have on society, business and culture in general.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to explain to our customers the effect of the Internet, and part of this was starting projects to show our clients the difference between traditional communications channels and online ones,\u201d said Welling. \u201cWe told them that with a good website, people find the information you offer instead of you having to send it out to the community. To illustrate this to our clients we decided to build a site.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The company was looking for a target audience that was difficult to reach with traditional media and one able to surf the Internet. \u201cExpats fell into this group,\u201d said Welling.<\/p>\n<p>Both groups were working on the same idea\u2014Lebo\u2019s team from the news angle and Welling\u2019s with a focus on basic information\u2014 they heard about each other, made contact and fell into a natural union.<\/p>\n<p>The first site launched was Expatica Netherlands in 2000, followed shortly afterwards by Belgium, then France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and most recently Luxembourg in 2010.<\/p>\n<p>Who works at Expatica now?<\/p>\n<p>Expatica\u2019s content has always been produced and managed by expatriates for expatriates. Currently, the nationalities of Expatica staff members include American, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Singaporean, Scottish and South African.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Expatica is the international community\u2019s home away from home on the web. It is a must-read for English-speaking expatriates and internationals across Europe. Expatica provides a tailored local news service and essential information on living in, working in or moving to your country of choice. With in-depth features, Expatica brings the international community closer together &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/?p=5992\" class=\"more-link\">Continuer la lecture<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> de &laquo;&nbsp;Expatica&nbsp;&raquo;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5992"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16699,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5992\/revisions\/16699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ngo.heidi-barathieu-brun.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}