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

People, place and networks – story #1

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. (Winston Churchill) I have been exploring finding the narrative in my research to try and make my thesis a less painful document to read…..here is the first attempt. There is ...

A story of a thesis in search of a narrative

This may be a little dull for anyone not interested in the process of actually writing a doctoral thesis – feel free to look away. Meeting with my supervisor this week its clear that I need to step it up a gear and start worrying about the right things. While ...

The inevitable “Why I blog” blog

I picked up a conversation on twitter last week where someone was attacking the role of academics and suggesting they shouldn’t criticise practitioners as writing and thinking aren’t as important as doing. I disagree – the act of reflecting and studying action is in my view essential if we are ...

Weak ties and strong spaces

This post is a bit of a hodgepodge of follow up from stuff I was working on last week – we’ll see if it weaves itself into one piece by the end. First up is a follow up on the social network analysis. Ethnobot was good enough to point me at ...

Who else thinks its a network society?

I can very easily be accused of over using a few key quotes in my presentations – the main one being this from Manuel Castells: ” Until we rebuild, both from the bottom up and from the top down, our institutes of governance and democracy, we will not be able to ...

Social network analysis – appreciation and health warning

Its very tempting to think there is a perfect match between social networks and social network analysis – and its true – there is a lot we can do with this to examine online social networks. However in doing this its important to understand what the limits of what we ...

Solace Masterclass slides

I’ve also put this up over at the Public-i Blog but in case you are interested this presentation is around social change and the network society and picks up on some of the agile theme from previous posts here.  Am working on something a little longer on this which I ...

Civic Creation – what is it and who does it?

This post is a good example of where my work and research start to come together.  Over at Public-i we have been working on a number of social media audits for clients and I have been working on a more formal framework to deliver this (white paper on this soon) ...

Identity and Citizenship – who are you anyway?

Identity matters – it’s a vital piece of context in conversation whether it’s established by digital footprint or physical presence.  One aspect of moving conversations from the informal to the formal sphere is the reconciliation of your online persona with your legal citizenship. People, like places, have a digital wrapper ...

Local Places for Local People…..

This is by way of a short overview of the session I ran at CityCamp Brighton on Saturday proper post on the whole event to follow. Being chair of the judging panel meant that I could’t pitch it so I am hoping that the write up at least will be ...

 
 
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