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
Introducing: Call Of Duty…..
I spent Saturday in Kent at transformedbyyou: You can see a lot of the content from the day on the Ning site and I know more is being added. I went partly because a knew there would be a lot of interesting people there (there were) and partly because I ...
Website or webspace?
Or how to avoid sounding like a social media guru …… I realise that I have drifted into the habit of talking about webspace rather than websites and I wanted to work through why this is – mainly to make sure it’s not just an abuse of the English language. ...
Dana Boyd interview: Teenagers online and some really good observations….
I just wanted to point out this interview with Danah Boyd – I like the fact that she makes it clear that so much of the behaviour we see online is actually normal teenage behaviour – its just happening online – which brings visability and longevity. She is very relaxed ...
#likeminds and the need to wrestle social media from the marketing people
Great energy at the likeminds conference and I wanted to try and capture some of my observations from the day before they go cold. The first observations was that it was a real pleasure to be at such a well run conference – the organization was superb and the speakers ...
A short appreciation of my new iphone
Having mentioned it more than a few times I thought I should at document my impressions of the iPhone – now we have been living together for a week….. This will be a short post as I am not that good with the touch screen typing yet – am hoping ...
Who should build the building???
Ok then – I am going to try and reach past the gadget haze that my new iPhone has left me with in order to try and put some thoughts together. But it is a thing of great beauty which works very nicely indeed – I’m impressed – can’t wait ...
Turns out what I am really interested in is civic spaces
I’ve had a really interesting week meeting all kinds of people – and as a result have had to talk a lot about what we are doing with the virtual town hall and the citizenscape product launch (I say had to – its very difficult to get me to stop ...
Community Ambassadors – bit of a rethink and a really long list….
The first set of Virtual Town Hall are hovering on the bring of launch – the development is all live but we are tweaking content and design – but they should be out in the wild later this week. In the meantime I wanted to get moving on the community ...
Guest blog – Social Civic nudge
The folks at Kent very kindly asked me to guest blog over at their innovation site – The post goes into some ideas around choice architecture and what this means for democratic spaces – all very relevant I think to Virtual Town Hall stuff. Full post can be found here.
Co-production: nice phrase or something new?
Bit of a hiatus on the blogging – mainly down to the fact that I have a new job. Still at Public-i but have been appointed as Chief Exec (press release here if you want to the proof!). Its a huge privilege as we have an exciting year ahead – ...
Digital Leadership All posts
We need new feedback loops
I’m really excited to see the shift in the Test, Learn and Grow work as ...
Field Notes All posts
It’s all about the question
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to help people get started with AI. ...
NHS Citizen All posts
NHS Citizen design – agile but structured
I wanted to capture my first reflection from the final NHS Citizen design workshop last ...