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

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 ...

Virtual Town Hall Workshop: North Lincs

The workshop at North Lincolnshire was slightly different to the others because it also involved some potential community ambassadors for the first half of the day. The team had put out a general notice about the event and so we were joined by a range of people from the council ...

Virtual Town Hall workshop @ Chorley

Just a quick note on my excellent day in Chorley on Monday. We were running through the internal workshop agenda for the Virtual Town Hall project which is aimed at: Project management stuff: Getting the internal team fully briefed on the project Getting support from senior managers and from key ...

Future eGov conference

Something of a blog hiatus as I have had multiple laptop traumas – am actually looking forward to catching up with it – just shows this blogging business is addictive.  I need to add a post from the ministerial conference in Malmo, our Europetitions and also our Virtual Town Hall ...

Virtual Town Hall workshop: Essex

Spent the day in Chelmsford today meeting loads of people re: Virtual Town Hall.  This is by way of some observations and notes for me to remember for research purposes: Meeting the districts: We spent the morning with 3 districts who are considering getting involved and we had a very ...

Contemplating twitter

So…not an original topic as everyone interested in social media is currently navel gazing on the same subject but you can’t have a research diary without recording these thoughts…so here we go….current twitter status:  37 tweets in with 49 followers and following 85 people so its early days but my ...

Displacement activity…

Too much time at the desk results in a new theme for the blog…….an exercise in design based futility…..but I am sure the perfect theme is out there….

Easy Barnet – a new relationship with citizens?

I have been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks – ever since I saw an excellent presentation on the work at Barnet at a session at the SOLACE annual conference.  the workshop was shared between Max Wilde (who in the Barnet lead for the project) and ...

Virtual Town Hall – October Project meeting

We had our second VirtualTH project meeting yesterday so this is just a short update on that.  The pilot is now full with Kirklees and Redbridge joining Chorley, Essex CC and North Lincs as pilot sites.  We are also lucky to have Carl Haggerty participate as a ‘critical friend’ on ...

 
 
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