A lot of my thinking about place has been shaped by social geographers like Doreen Massey or more recently by economic thinking about how to drive place based growth. In considering how to build digital civic infrastructure I leaned heavily into the idea of a story of place and the need to find or create …
We should all be rethinking our leadership skills to make sure that they work in the 21st Century. The network society needs networked leaders – but this risks being rather a trite statement unless I try and unpack it a bit. I have been thinking about the nature of networked leadership a lot recently. One …
What if we defined the purpose of digital public services as being to build a more participative relationship with the public? If we are seeing the emergence of the network society then don’t we have to? One of the reasons I believe that you can’t design an effective digital strategy without thinking about 21st century citizens and …
If libraries are some of the best examples of civic space which we have then is your library card a potential route to democratic participation? I spent last Saturday with the Association of Senior Childrens and Educational librarians at their annual conference. I was speaking about libraries as digital civic spaces and I wanted to …
I have a long running sofa argument with my husband about the fact that he believes that at some point soon the googleplex (the Howe domestic shortcode for machine based decision making in the cloud) will take over the business of government and that messy old democracy will fall by the wayside. I disagree (hence …
This post was inspired by Andrea Siodmok, Anthony Zach and my friend Meriel – each of whom in their own way pushed me over the edge (in a good way) to actually submit the corrections to my thesis rather than hoarding them gollam-like and simply muttering “my precious my precious” in my study. Thanks folks …
This is a slightly belated write up from the NHS Citizen event in Birmingham (details here) and is just intended to capture my reflections on the mapping exercise. Sometimes its good to let these things sit for a bit and so here are my observations: We can’t map everything. Both of the mapping sessions we …
This is going to be one of those annoying posts which strays between research stuff and more practical things. I’m writing it to tease out an inconsistency in my thinking around both the thesis and also our design work for Citizenscape. It really is thinking in public so please feel free to look away and …
Howard Rheingold was one of the first people who articulated the promise of the social web. With “Homesteading on the Virtual Frontier” he literally wrote the book on online community. Rheingold is an unapologetic enthusiast for the potential of digital community and the network society but he is also thoughtful and balanced in his examination …
This post is partially a write up of the identity session I curated at #UKGovCamp and partially a framing piece to help take forwards our discussions about how we handle the question of identity within the We Live Here Project and Citizenscape development more generally. Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the session. The …