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

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 ...

Europetitions and other new things

I have just spent a couple of days in London for the launch of our new EU funded project: Europetition which has been designed to do two things: To build up clusers of local petitioning organisations – usually Local Authorities – in our 5 pilot regions so that they can ...

Pilot questionnaire?????

I have decided to get on and set-up my pilot questionnaire in order to establish a benchmark of behaviour from the pilot sites so that I can then see whether or not the work at the sites is having any effect. I plan to administer the same questionnaire to all ...

The PLU problem online – a short thought

Looking at the world with a social captial filter on we need to remember the three types of social captial – Bonding, Bridging and Linking (Putman). One of the notable features about most online communities is their homogeneity – ie their bonding capital. Given the need for formal democracy to ...

What was the question anyway?

Still at it with the actual research question so am trying to come at it from a different angle. This post is as I was at the dentist earlier in the week and trying to explain what I was doing to Charlie (the dentist) as an avoidance technique – which ...

Digital Divide: Pippa Norris

Another day, another book review…..I picked up the Pippa Norris book as there seemed to be some interesting parallels between what she was talking about in terms of Internet take up from third world countries as a way of looking at the problems of getting first world users to adopt ...