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

Howard Rheingold: The Virtual Community

I have been re-reading Howard Rheingold’s book on the virtual communities and wanted to save my observations while they are still fresh in my mind. Its brilliant book where his enthusiasm for the the ‘electronic frontier’ that the internet provides is palpable on every page. He is also eminently readable ...

What’s the actual question?

I need to actually define my research question so that I can get going on the research proposal (have had close encounter with an exam this week and intend to never ever leave something so acutely to the last minute again). I am currently looking at the following wording: “Is ...

December project meeting: Update

The Citizenscape December project meeting went much better than I hoped with the balance being in favour of actual work rather than EU project talk. Main points are: We made some real progress with the actual content for the sites and I believe that if we can keep to the ...

Co-Creation

This is a short note prior to a proper post but as we move forward with getting the Citizenscape sites actually up and running you can start to see why the idea of co-creation needs to be so strong in the citizenscape methodology. The Citizenscape sites will be containers for ...

Citizenscape – December 08 project meeting planning

The team is going to get together in December in Brighton and apart from finding somewhere really good to take them to dinner I want to be clear on the objectives for the meeting: There are as ever some EU project formalities which need to be gone over – not the ...

Agile – First sprint

Well – end of the first sprint and things have gone really well (and as I write I realise how rare it is to be able to say this!). The agile process has given us much more focus and it is really good for giving a real sense of progress ...

eDemocracy conference

I was at the Headstar edemocracy conference on Tuesday (link here) which was as ever a really good programme. The keynote speaker was the head of News from the BBC (Helen Boaden) and she gave an excellent presentation – not the least because she made excellent use of the AV ...

Agile – some reading

We (at work) have been looking at introducing Agile as a devlopment process so I have been reading up. As ever wikipedia gives a good overview but I also liked this site which has a simple template for listing work What I like about agile is the way that it ...

What on earth is Citizenscape???

As I write it occurs to me that I will be mentioning Citizenscape a great deal and so it will be useful to at least provide the basic overview of what it is. Citizenscape is really three different things: Its an EU funded project: You can find out more at ...

Action research diary

I found this useful sumamry of an action research diary (http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arr/arow/rdiary.html). The first thing that struck me was the need for me to have more structure in my posts. This suggests splitting posts under the following sections: Reflection Plan Action Observation So I might give this a go. I have ...