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

Dunbar’s number – networks are not all rational you know

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks This is brief write up of the Robin Dunbar book “How many friends does one person need?”.  I read the book as a balance to the way in which its very easy to start thinking of networks ...

A tale of two networks

I’m not going to try and comment on what has been happening in London and beyond over the last few nights – I don’t feel qualified apart from to express the outrage and sympathy that so many people thankfully share – I do want to add my view though as ...

Lex Informatica

When I say Facebook is evil its firstly a cheap shot aimed at getting an immediate laugh out of the audience – I have to say that it usually works. I think it hits a chord with people as all good jokes should. While evil is perhaps an overstatement its ...

#localgovcamp – Agile session

So – this is the write up from the agile session I led at #localgovcamp. Much of the preamble I started off with can be found in other blog posts but the core of the session was trying to move the conversation that was had at UKGovCamp in January on ...

Becoming agile

I sometimes use the description of the internet as being very like a teenager, messy, difficult, and creative and with a tremendous energy and excitement that is not always focused constructively.  The shifting cultural norms online feel as if they are driven by that generation and it’s not surprising – ...

Epic Localgovcamp

I drove up to Birmingham on a very wet Friday night with the feeling I usually have before an unconference – a mix of pleasant anticipation and mild resentment for giving up my weekend.  As ever I left feeling stimulated, challenged and warmed by the people I spent Saturday with. ...

How many identities do you need anyway?

This is a write up of a session that I facilitated at the excellent LocalGovCamp yesterday. I wanted to run the session as an extension of some work I am doing around identity that you can read about here – and luckily a bunch of people where also interested in ...

Who’s talking? Social media audits and finding the conversations

As regular readers will be aware….I have a bee in my bonnet about the need for someone to start building civic spaces online – spaces which are designed to support civic and political discourse rather than designed to sell us stuff. However it’s all very well having the idea – ...

Affordances of civic spaces

I couldn’t seem to find a quick description of what I mean by online civic space and thought I’d better pop up a definition.  The purpose which I prescribe for a civic space is:  to provide an environment in which any citizen who chooses to can observe, audit and participate ...

Reconciling identity and place

I have been trying to separate and then reconcile ideas of identity and place online – this post is an attempt to explain where I have got to. I sometimes describe the social web as digital wrapper around our physical world. I imagine it in my head as something like ...

 
 
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