Thinking and doing: theory and practice

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. If you are new to this space you may find it helpful to read my ‘why I still 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 Dorset Council.

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.

If you are looking for my professional bio then you need to head over to LinkedIn .

Dr Catherine Howe

Here are some of the things I am currently working on:

Latest posts

Democracy in its many forms

This post is as a result of a single line in the suggested corrections for my thesis: “The candidate should provide a brief overview and/or explanation of what form of democracy is being referred to as there appears to be a conflation of normative forms of democracy”. It’s a fair ...

Mapping the NHS: Prototype questionnaire

So, this post is a run through of what we plan to do to test the mapping process which evolved from the mapping event I blogged about here. We are going to test a paper based process with the intention of turning this into an online data collection tool. We ...

Proto-Mapping NHS Citizen

This is my write up from the mapping session we held in Leeds in December. This is the first post in a new research project but it connects to earlier work on the networks of networks concept and also the creation of digital civic space. Its part of the NHS Citizen project ...

Adaptive programme management

I have been thinking about how you could best apply agile principles to project management for a while – you can read some of my earlier musing here. This draft programme design has been drawn from my experience in both action research and also agile development – the latter being ...

Defining civic and reconsidering critical theory

This post has been provoked by reading “The Political Web: Media, Participation and Alternative Democracy” by Peter Dahlgren (Kindle edition, 2013) as part of the viva prep. Rather than a full write up (which I will do at a later date I hope as the book was excellent) its more ...

Viva la thesis!

This is a quick post intended to thank some people as last week I successfully completed by viva and, subject to corrections which I will explain below, am 99% there to becoming Dr Howe (or Dr Curious – I can’t decide). Best way to do this (and also for George ...

NHS Citizen – thank you

This is a quick reflection on the NHSCitizen event this week – its really intended to capture the thoughts which are still circling in my mind and reflect my opinions rather than the team as a whole – hence it appearing here rather than the project blog. I find this ...

Social Council getting its groove

I had a great couple of days in Solihull this week with the Social Council team and others and while I have a huge pile of notes and actions to write up I wanted to capture my immediate reflections/observations using the famous @danslee 20 point blog post method (yes – ...