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

Listening is not just waiting for the other person to stop speaking

Just got home from the Listening to Communities Conference at Kent and wanted to capture my thoughts on it as its been a really interesting day.  There is a posterous site coming together around it so I recommend you have a look there at what people put up over the next few ...

Technological determinism – or not

I had breakfast with my supervisor last week which is always a pleasure – and pretty much guaranteed to reboot and sharpen my thinking. We also reflected on the fact that though its a Good Thing that I have a first half first draft it is going to need taking ...

UKGC11 – thank you

I really had an excellent day at UKGovCamp yesterday (for other blogs and tweets have a look here) and before I go into the detail of it I want to take a moment to pause and thank Dave Briggs and Steph Gray for an outstanding organising job. Or as may be ...

The Plan is not the Objective

This is a write up of a session that I was part of at UKGovCamp11 – I’ve written it as a separate post as I want to take these ideas forward in some way and need to think about how to do this. A few of us have been speaking ...

#ff deficit reduction

I am rubbish at #ff partly because I never get round to it, partly because I never remember on a Friday and partly because I have yet to find an iphone client which makes it easy to pick a list of people (suggestions on this very welcome).  Anyway, I read content from some really ...

A quick overview of digital activism

Much of the thinking within my thesis is highly influenced by the behaviours and effects of communities – specifically geographically defined communities. However to limit my research to just this kind of civic activity is to ignore much of the online participation that is reaching beyond the purely social. Digital activism covers a range of ...

A really quick overview of online communities

This is a brief post giving a quick overview of online or virtual community as I realised I need a few paragraphs as I was putting my thesis together – might add to it at some point.  Online community is such an established idea for anyone who works with the ...

Facts…I think…

Right – may have gone a little mad today but have assembled a LOT of facts into a new page (its was too big even for me to post as a blog entry). So I present with fear and trepidation Facts Glorious  Facts for you to enjoy… I am not yet happythat this has ...

Some thoughts on the Networked Neighbourhoods research

This post I one I promised a while ago in order to do proper justice to the excellent Networked Neighbourhoods report on hyperlocal websites. You can read about the launch event here and access the research directly here. I’m not going to try and replicate the excellent summary and background ...

 
 
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