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

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 – ...

Chorley snow tweets

You’ll have noticed its been snowing….and there has been lots of twitter action at #uksnow (interesting article on this here). I have been keeping a vague eye on the the council’s using twitter to communicate snow information as these kinds of ‘crisis comms’ needs is one of the ways we ...

Social Police…..

I had a really interesting morning last week at the Policing Pledge conference which was aimed at best practice around the new policing pledge. I ran two workshops and I wanted to share the slides here: The groups where both very tolerant of both my crazed enthusiasm for the subject ...

More on those community ambassadors – and a picture

I meant to blog this at the weekend but annual tree decorating party got in the way. As the halls are now fully decked with boughs of holly (and a lot of paper chains thanks to extensive child labour) normal blogging resumes….. I wanted to capture some thoughts about the ...

And another workshop – Kirklees

Ok then – this is the last of this year’s workshop posts as I think the Redbridge session will fall into next year now. We had an excellent day at Kirklees which also spent some time talking technology and trying to develop the fit with the existing 21st Century Councillor ...