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
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 ...
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 ...
Digital Leadership All posts
Government Digital Service redux
This is a quick ‘hot take’ as the kids say about the launch of the ...
Field Notes All posts
Democratic dreams
Another post with some dreams – very much from a personal perspective and as someone ...
NHS Citizen All posts
NHS Citizen design – agile but structured
I wanted to capture my first reflection from the final NHS Citizen design workshop last ...