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

Community Policing online

I was lucky enough to speak at the National Police Web Managers Conference on Friday (slides below). It’s interesting to talk about digital engagement in a different public sector context and the Police are especially interesting because of the challenge that they face in trying to combine operational needs with ...

Why we all need to read the people we disagree with

I wrote this last weekend but didn’t get round to making it live – its is a proper research diary post – so look away if you are not in an academic frame of mind….. Main feature of the weekend has been Cass Sunsteins’ Republic 2.0 as well as some ...

Europetitions and how to tell a story in 5 languages

I’ve spent most of the week in Vincenza in northern Italy at a Europetitions project meeting. The point of the project is to try and get support for petitions to the European Parliament from more than one member state. Petitioning the european parliament is actually quite popular – however the ...

A little social reportage from the LGComms conference

I spent most of last week in Leeds at the LGComms conference and just wanted to capture a few thoughts about this.  I also did a lot of tweeting from the conference as I decided to do that as a way of taking my own notes and that worked very ...

Living in a world of the merely improbable

This post is a bit of a wander about a few topics so bear with me – it should all come together. The first thing was a reaction around the spending cuts and Queens speech from this week. It’s clearly the thin end of the wedge and anyone who works ...

Election reflection

Just a short piece this week as I had to write something for a print deadline this weekend – and finish that pesky research committee progress report – but I couldn’t let the week pass without just noting a couple of election thoughts.  In doing this I am sure I ...

So what’s actually new with all this new stuff?

Some time ago I wrote on my noticeboard the question “What is new technology good at?” – I thought I should probably have a stab at answering it (rest assured that this doesn’t mean that future posts will be on other topics from the notice board such as how to ...

A democratic view of social media behaviours

More work on the theoretical framework which will be dull for anyone who is not interested in trying to come up with a way of analysing behaviours with the hope of influencing them – this is very much an action research post for my purposes. Lovely Easter (and actually I ...

Law and social media – dull but important

Last week I spent a day at a social media legal masterclass (details are here if you want them ) with an excellent presenter in Kathryn Corrick. I attended as I wanted to make sure I have a proper overview of what the legal issues are and to get a bit ...

 
 
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