Welcome and thanks for visiting. This blog is where I write about projects I am working on, capture my research in progress and generally organise my thinking in public. It helps me enormously to have a place to do this – I hope you also find it useful. I try and maintain a running post with some definitions and background reading that may be helpful.
I tend to roam between designing for democracy and more general thinking about technology driven change and the digital mindset. I’m increasing thinking about systems practice as well as my own leadership practice. You may find it helpful to read this ‘why I blog blog’ but suffice to say that this a place where I share my thinking in public but that means its subject to change and may look quite different when its actually applied in my role at Adur and Worthing.
If you are looking for my professional bio then you need to head over to LinkedIn . If you are trying to find me online for a more research orientated discussion then you can find me on twitter as @curiousc. If you want to contact to me about speaking at an event then you can contact me via either of these routes.
Dr Catherine Howe
Here are some of the things I am currently working on:
Latest posts
CFGS: Opportunity Knocks
This is an overview of the keynote speech that I gave at the CFGS conference. Clearly I am biased as the chair but I thought it was a brilliant conference, really carefully curated and hosted and with a real buzz about it as people came together to talk about the ...
Local digital: SPRINT!
I’ve been reflecting on how the GDS local government sprint goals that Theo Blackwell is leading on and after a conversation with the team there I said I would suggest some practical prototyping which could help right now as we wrestle with Devo / LGR / Planning reform and of ...
Government Digital Service redux
This is a quick ‘hot take’ as the kids say about the launch of the new digital centre for government yesterday. There were only a few local government people there so I thought it would be helpful to share. In parallel the state of digital government was published (spoiler alert: ...
Democratic dreams
Another post with some dreams – very much from a personal perspective and as someone who has been thinking and researching in this space for a fair while now… While devolution is a huge and wide scale shift in how our democracy and state will operate its very very light ...
Devolution by design
Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and ...
Digital dreams
In my other start of the year post I talked about some of my democratic and design dreams for the year – in this one I want to share my digital dreams. Stepping back from devolution question and into the reorganisation one, the opportunity for modernisation which comes with the ...
Setting up 2025
I’m having a slightly unusual start to the year as my husband and I (along with half of the rest of the country it seems!) have been absolutely wiped out by some kind of bug and we are just about staggering back into the real world. It makes me extra ...
Week (ish) notes
I’ve been on holiday* and have used some of the time to catch up on things I wanted to capture here and perhaps come back to: I have am still getting responses to my piece on buying better stuff (thank you!) and I am going to invite people who are ...
Shape the market and buy better stuff
Last week we stopped the implementation of a major upgrade of a piece of legacy software as it really didn’t meet the hype it was sold with and clearly wasn’t going to support our modernisation work. Stopping something like this is hard in any circumstances and stopping a project with ...
AI musing – time to get engaged
Having said goodbye to social media (sort of) and having largely bypassed the data hype cycle as being a technocratic rather than social one (with a large exception for a fascination with the quantified self and big data meets IOT which I might come back to) I am fully on ...
Digital Leadership All posts
Local digital: SPRINT!
I’ve been reflecting on how the GDS local government sprint goals that Theo Blackwell is ...
Field Notes All posts
CFGS: Opportunity Knocks
This is an overview of the keynote speech that I gave at the CFGS conference. ...
NHS Citizen All posts
NHS Citizen design – agile but structured
I wanted to capture my first reflection from the final NHS Citizen design workshop last ...