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

Consultation as unfashionable knitwear

We had a really great We Live Here project meeting earlier this week and so this post started as an action research one – however it got a bit out of hand as ever its also influenced by a couple of other things I have been up to this week ...

We live exactly here on a map

This is another action research note on We Live Here – the Brighton and Hove Creative Councils project. You can read previous posts here. The last few weeks have been spent in parallel project planning and also starting the community mapping exercise. We had a really good team meeting last ...

Open by default and design

I’ve been mentally hibernating for the last couple of weeks after some rather robust feedback from my supervisor on the latest draft of my thesis which means that I have some large rewrites to do – this post is an action research note reflecting on some of these rewrites. As ...

First thoughts on Networked Leadership

I was one of 5 facilitators at the Solace Summit a couple of weeks ago and I have been mulling the experience ever since. The event was unusual in that rather having what has always been a perfectly good but rather traditional conference the Solace team (with some I have ...

Making Localism a Reality

Interesting day today spent at a conference in Kent for Elected Members. We spent the day talking about, as the title says, making localism a reality. My slides from my session are below: As ever my focus was on giving members a reason to go online rather than trying to ...

New OXIS Data – yum yum

This weekend you’ll be pleased to know I have been reading the recently released update of the OXIS survey (which you can get hold of here – but large thanks to Tim Davies for posting me a copy!).  I have also been updating my Facts Glorious Facts page if you like that ...

Digital relics and persistence of narrative

Just when you thought it was enough trouble to try and get your community to create a hyperlocal website then you realise that you also need to create a process of renewal and regeneration.  This post has followed on from a social media audit we have been doing up in ...

Open comments to match open process

This is by way of a reflection on the creative councils programme and process rather than our specific project which I have covered off here.  I meant to post it last week but as ever events overtook me and I got distracted…. First off though – the team that NESTA ...

We Still Live Here even after going to Birmingham

I spent a couple of days last week with the We Live Here Team at the Creative Councils Camp in Birmingham so this post is an attempt to capture some thoughts from the experience.  My first thought is that I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the team – thank you ...

We Live Here…or rather…where do we live?

One of the reasons I started this blog was as an action research diary to support my PHD.  I’ve found it hugely useful and having just gone through the process of analysing and writing up my reflections on the Virtual Town Hall project for my thesis I am reminded how ...

 
 
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