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’ve also started a running post with some definitions and background reading that may be helpful.

Current lines of enquiry are captured in this enquiry map but I tend to roam between designing for democracy and more general thinking about technology driven change and the digital mindset. 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

Thrive?

Back again for more week notes…. Really pleased to see our Climate Assembly getting up and running with Demsoc as our delivery partner. We had a big milestone this week with our participants being finalised which is brilliant and makes it all very real. Or rather virtual as we are ...

Creating capacity for change

Conversations with both Cassie Robinson and Noel Hatch have made me resolve to try and get back to my weekly blogging habit and do some proper week notes. These are going to be a bit of a shopping list I think to start with as I’m still all over the ...

Can we define a difference between volunteering and active citizenship?

Over recent months we have seen an explosion in both active citizenship and in volunteering. These both bring tremendous value to the fabrics of place and society and I am interested in the acts that are at the boundary as well as the connections between the two. We can see ...

Enquiry Map July 2020

I am talking about enquiry a lot at the moment and I want to unpack what I mean partly as it’s a good habit in your practice to reflect on these terms you use a lot and partly because I am meeting a lot of new people at the moment ...

People get stuck….until they don’t

I have a theory that people and systems tend to get ‘stuck’ at the point at which they have their digital moment and realise that the world could actually be different and that looking at how you change ways of working as well as the underlying technology could be part ...

So long and thanks for all the digital fish

I left Cancer Research UK last week and while this is not exactly a goodbye to digital transformation it does signal a shift for me – instead of supporting other people to make change happen I will be leading change in the services that I am responsible for – working ...

Going to not going from

I have rewritten this first sentence about 20 times because its hard to express how sad I am be leaving my current team at the same time as expressing my huge pride and delight at the fact I am leaving in order to join Adur and Worthing Councils as Director ...

Thank you #NotWestminster

This is a really quick reflection on really brilliant day at NotWestminster – in the tradition of the 10 things style – but not actually bothering to count how many things. I am also working on a write up from the session I ran. Its been a while since I’ve ...

Ethical technology?

Forget about values – its about ethics these days Ethical thinking must be a significant shaper of technology in the 2020s. I am not in the habit of making predictions so let’s call this a hope based on a growing sense that people are starting to really look at the ...