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

Bluelightcamp: Discussion on the network of networks and digital neighbourhoods

These are some notes from the discussion we had at Bluelightcamp on the network of networks concept. This is a collision of two projects I am currently working on: The network of networks project that was discussed at CityCamp Brighton The Citizenscape projects we are in the process of getting ...

In which I put my faith in humans

This is the write of up of the session I ran with Davy Jones at CityCamp Brighton in which we asked three questions: What is the simplest thing we can do to connect all the many excellent civic networks we can find in Brighton? How can we give that network ...

UKGovCamp13 – thanks and challenge

<plug> Ok – am firstly going to use this to SHAMELESSLY plug the fact that CityCamp Brighton is happening for the third time this coming weekend (22-24th march)) so please come along if you are either local or interested </plug>. Any post about UKGovCamp needs to start with a huge ...

We need to talk about politics

I was the Guardian’s Public Leaders Summit on Wednesday as well as at the NLGN’s Future Councillor event on Saturday and this post is reflection on both of those events. I’ve also been hearing back from some of the Police Officers I am working with on the Strategic Command Course ...

Surveillance or Participation?

This is going to be one of those annoying posts which strays between research stuff and more practical things. I’m writing it to tease out an inconsistency in my thinking around both the thesis and also our design work for Citizenscape. It really is thinking in public so please feel ...

Mistress of Networks

This is the follow up post on the Master of Networks event I wrote about here. The objective of the event was to bring together policy makers and network scientists to examine how network thinking might play a role in the policy making process. As I am supposed to be ...

What I would have said at the ADSO Conference…

….if I hadn’t got stuck in Sussex owing to #uksnow Firstly – apologies to anyone who was actually looking forward to me speaking – I always feel a bit of a whuss cancelling because of bad weather but it really was rather slippery out there…anyway here are the slides that ...

Tracking a democratic conversation across different online media

This post is an outline of one of the policy question that we are discussing that the Master of Networks event (in Venice!!) next week. While not a proper paper as its an academic audience you may find this slightly more referenced than usual…its really lazy referencing with just signposts ...

Councillor Camp – Links and Love

So – this is going to be a fairly quick one (for me) but here are some links and thoughts from a brilliant day yesterday at Councillor Camp. Firstly – a massive well done to the FutureGov team and in particular Jon Foster for a really well run event with ...

Hello 2013

I usually spend the first week of the New Year hibernating and this year was no different. I like to spend the time at home doing various forms of domestic organisation and getting projects started and ready for the year. This year I have been spending most of the time ...