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. I try and maintain a running post with some definitions and background reading that may be helpful.

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. You may find it helpful to read this ‘why I 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 Adur and Worthing.

If you are looking for my professional bio then you need to head over to LinkedIn . If you are trying to find me online for a more research orientated discussion then you can find me on twitter as @curiousc. If you want to contact to me about speaking at an event then you can contact me via either of these routes.

Dr Catherine Howe

Here are some of the things I am currently working on:

Latest posts

Why the talk about informal and formal democracy?

I have been talking for some time about a split between formal and informal participation in democracy. I draw this distinction in order to show the difference which acts which are politically aware but not linked to a formal decision making process (ie informal participation) and formal acts which are ...

CitizenScape project meeting; Slovakia!

I have just got back from a trip to Slovakia for our latest CitzenScape project meeting. As ever on these trips the hospitality was amazing and we got a lot done – we also seemed to drink rather a lot but that’s also typical of these trips! Some general observations ...

Habermas: The public sphere

Jurgen Habermas a pre-eminent social and political theorist whose ideas around the “Public Sphere” have influenced much of the contemporary thinking around the information or network society. Habermas describes the public sphere as a shared public conversation which encapsulates political, social and cultural debate. He argues that this public sphere ...

The Network Society and a whole new load of reading….

Busy weekend with lots of literature review as well as proposal writing for EU funded projects. I have also been reading around ideas of co-creation as well the Network Society this weekend. Both of these are going to be fairly central within my literature review. The network or information society ...

Council rules of engagement for the social web: V0.0

Well the good thing about this research proposal writing is that it does get me thinking about other things in a massive work avoidance scheme. That and the fact the day is so beautiful means that progress on the main project is slow!! Anyway, I have been thinking more about ...

Town Hall 2.0

I am really writing this to put a marker down for future thinking. I am working on my research proposal for the PHD at the moment and this is a idea which is itching me but I can’t scratch it right now as I need to be focusing down on ...

Setting webcast meetings free…..or what to do about YouTube

I probably haven’t mentioned before but my ‘day job’ involves working with Local Authorities in order to help them use technology to enhance the democratic process – either by making old processes work online or helping them to create new models of democratic engagement (hence CitizenScape). The core of this ...

Where do we start the citizenscape process?

I have had a really interesting week and wanted to write a note on it before it drifted off and got filed somewhere in my memory for later retrieval as a few things have happened which have really helped tie together some thoughts around community building with a social purpose ...

Pilot / benchmarking questionnaire

I am taking a break from the statistical wrestling necessitated by my exam next week to note down my thoughts on my questionnaire as its been preying on my mind and is a lot more interesting than the stats (or to be more accurate more interesting than SPSS – the ...

Monetising the social web

The post on the questionnaire has been hijacked by my pressing need to pass a stats course which is being examined next week – ask me about ANOVA if you are not afraid to hear the answer! However I just wanted to note this thought as its been on my ...