It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. (Winston Churchill) I have been exploring finding the narrative in my research to try and make my thesis a less painful document to read…..here is the first attempt. There is a problem that needs thinking …
This may be a little dull for anyone not interested in the process of actually writing a doctoral thesis – feel free to look away. Meeting with my supervisor this week its clear that I need to step it up a gear and start worrying about the right things. While I have been quietly obsessing …
I picked up a conversation on twitter last week where someone was attacking the role of academics and suggesting they shouldn’t criticise practitioners as writing and thinking aren’t as important as doing. I disagree – the act of reflecting and studying action is in my view essential if we are to learn from our actions …
This post is a bit of a hodgepodge of follow up from stuff I was working on last week – we’ll see if it weaves itself into one piece by the end. First up is a follow up on the social network analysis. Ethnobot was good enough to point me at the work of Damon Centola …
I can very easily be accused of over using a few key quotes in my presentations – the main one being this from Manuel Castells: ” Until we rebuild, both from the bottom up and from the top down, our institutes of governance and democracy, we will not be able to stand up to the fundamental …
Its very tempting to think there is a perfect match between social networks and social network analysis – and its true – there is a lot we can do with this to examine online social networks. However in doing this its important to understand what the limits of what we can achieve with it without …
I’ve also put this up over at the Public-i Blog but in case you are interested this presentation is around social change and the network society and picks up on some of the agile theme from previous posts here. Am working on something a little longer on this which I should get up later this …
This post is a good example of where my work and research start to come together. Over at Public-i we have been working on a number of social media audits for clients and I have been working on a more formal framework to deliver this (white paper on this soon) and so I have been …
Identity matters – it’s a vital piece of context in conversation whether it’s established by digital footprint or physical presence. One aspect of moving conversations from the informal to the formal sphere is the reconciliation of your online persona with your legal citizenship. People, like places, have a digital wrapper which extends their identity from …
This is by way of a short overview of the session I ran at CityCamp Brighton on Saturday proper post on the whole event to follow. Being chair of the judging panel meant that I could’t pitch it so I am hoping that the write up at least will be of use. The basic premise …