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

Open by Default

I find myself using the phrase ‘open by default’ more and more frequently. This post is an attempt to explore what I mean. We use so many of these terms so rather loosely so that they start to lose their meaning – engage, participate, innovate, open – if we want ...

CityCamp Brighton – my 20 things

Rather than a huge piece that might take me a while to mull over here (with HT to Dan Slee for the suggestion) are my 20 observations from CityCamp this weekend: We all owe Anthony and Susie huge thanks for their work in the organisation.  I helped – but not ...

Identity and Democratic Deliberation

This post is partially a write up of the identity session I curated at #UKGovCamp and partially a framing piece to help take forwards our discussions about how we handle the question of identity within the We Live Here Project and Citizenscape development more generally. Huge thanks to everyone who ...

Taking the Technology out of Agile – #UKGC12

This is my write up of the session that @pubstrat and I curated at UKGC12. Large apologies for the delay. @pubstrat and I have been meaning to have coffee and general catchup ever since UKGC11 and I am hugely glad we finally managed it as it set my brain buzzing ...

Cultural Exchange and networked teams

So – it turns out that my inability to fix my research methods chapter had the effect of rendering me unable to write anything else – who can understand the workings of the human mind??? Chapter 4 now dispatched I am now trying to catch up on backlog (this includes ...

Action Research Reflection with a little Agile thrown in

This is by way of a short Action Research reflection so if you are not interested in that kind of thing then move along! Next post will be the write-up of the Agile session at #UKGC12 and much more practical I promise. I have been mulling on the tension between ...

my 20 things from #ukgov12

If you pitch 4 sessions you will have a lot to write up We have moved on from last year – more stuff is mainstream and big ideas are being taken seriously.  However we now need to focus on building a proper evidence base to stop ourselves running away with ...

#ukgc12 – Elected PCC Session

Huge thanks to the folks who joined me for the session on elected Police and Crime Commissioners – including @demsoc, @Nickkeane, @SashaTayler and a some others who I don’t yet know on twitter. I used the session to test and expand some work I have been doing on this which ...

Of course we have an agenda

Happy New year! I have been off in a Christmas and PHD (and drink) filled bubble for the last few weeks but as I am back in the office on the 9th I need to catch up on some blogging – which is a welcome change from the tedious but ...

 
 
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