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

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 ...

Smart phones by Christmas…..

Ok then – this is not just a continuation of my “I need an iphone” lament but here is a quick article on the BBC site talking about the growth of the smart phone market. The striking quote is about the fact that mobile internet is poised for the kind ...

Social Web Framework: Version 0.5

This post is really about trying to explain the mental framework by which I ‘organise’ the social web into different categories of behaviour and types of technologies. This is very much my own view but builds on frameworks and analysis by others which I referenced. I have written it as ...

Social contracts for social websites

Though I am getting very excited about the technology for the virtual town hall (sad I know) the real challenges are I think in the social elements of creating a permanent civic space – a local public sphere (yes – lots of Habermas read this weekend).   There are three main ...

Social networking policies

I’m trying to get a list together of published social networking policies – or at least published drafts).  At the moment I have: Warwickshire Devon I am sure I have more of these lurking in my inbox but would really appreciate hearing from anyone else who can add to this ...

#tal09 – good piece in the guardian

Good piece in the guradian about the Talk about Local unconference – you can read about it here. Perhaps its my reaction to reading the Coleman book this weekend but I think this hyperlocalism is very important and very much the approach we are taking with the virtual town hall ...

myconservatives? Or someone elses??

Perhaps it is just because I have only started twittering this week but there did seem to be a lot of talk about the new conservative party website – but perhaps the twitterati are always this vocal! Of the articles/blogs I’ve read today I thought the futuregov one was probably ...

Hoping for the iPlayer effect with social media?

Interesting article today from the Guardian – talking about the fact the BBC are planning a major website re-write with social media at the heart of things.  You can read the article here. At Public-i where we do a lot of work using video for democratic projects we really saw ...

 
 
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