My lovely husband and I have spent the last couple of weeks sorting out the move down to Dorset and getting set up in our new place. It’s a process of working through which bits of our old life we want to bring with us and which we’re going leave with love behind in Sussex. …| www.curiouscatherine.info
My lovely husband and I have spent the last couple of weeks sorting out the move down to Dorset and getting set up in our new place. It’s a process of working through which bits of our old life we want to bring with us and which we’re going leave with love behind in Sussex. This is a joyous (most of the time) process of decluttering and appreciation and we feel very lucky to be able to do it.| Catherine Howe
I have used the fact I was on a panel on AI at the Stronger Things conference with some brilliant people to get my thinking organised around AI and community power. The session is called: Responsible robots – how to embed community power in your digital, data and AI strategy. The whole conference was fantastic with great energy and purpose – highly recommend it!| Catherine Howe
Starting back at the DCN conference I’ve been talking about design a lot as I try and make the case that we need to design our new unitaries before we start to measure them. I’ve also been part of some really thoughtful work from the Policy lab on this and also some research carried out by DWP which you can read here.| Catherine Howe
I’ve been really touched by the comments I’ve had on LinkedIn about as well as the notes and messages from my staff I’ve been sent the result of announcing that I’ll be leaving Adur and Worthing in July to take up the post of Chief Executive of Dorset Council in August. Thank you.| Catherine Howe
This is an overview of the keynote speech that I gave at the CFGS conference. Clearly I am biased as the chair but I thought it was a brilliant conference, really carefully curated and hosted and with a real buzz about it as people came together to talk about the role of governance and scrutiny in democracy. | Catherine Howe
I’ve been reflecting on how the GDS local government sprint goals that Theo Blackwell is leading on and after a conversation with the team there I said I would suggest some practical prototyping which could help right now as we wrestle with Devo / LGR / Planning reform and of course the money….| Catherine Howe
This is a quick ‘hot take’ as the kids say about the launch of the new digital centre for government yesterday. There were only a few local government people there so I thought it would be helpful to share.| Catherine Howe
Another post with some dreams – very much from a personal perspective and as someone who has been thinking and researching in this space for a fair while now… While devolution is a huge and wide scale shift in how our democracy and state will operate its very very light in terms of democratic innovation ...| Catherine Howe
Speaking very personally, I’m living with the tension between being passionately up for both local government reorganisation and devolution and my equally strongly held belief that how you do something really has an impact on the outcome you are creating. This was always going to be a messy process and the balance between figure it ...| Catherine Howe
In my other start of the year post I talked about some of my democratic and design dreams for the year – in this one I want to share my digital dreams. Stepping back from devolution question and into the reorganisation one, the opportunity for modernisation which comes with the creation dozens of new organisations ...| Catherine Howe
Last week we stopped the implementation of a major upgrade of a piece of legacy software as it really didn’t meet the hype it was sold with and clearly wasn’t going to support our modernisation work.| Catherine Howe
Given I only managed to post my 2023 intentions in August it feels a bit soon to be posting again – but here we are with some intentions for 2024 – all written alongside the annual sorting week.| Catherine Howe
I have been fascinated by the power of online community to provide real support and connection for people for nearly 20 years (eek) and when the internet got social, I was an early and enthusiastic adopter.| Catherine Howe
I have been pitching an idea for a while now which almost always lands well and which I can’t leave alone, so I thought I would put it out more widely in the universe and see what happens….| Catherine Howe
I wrote this piece back in January but didn’t post it and I was going to discard it but decided not to as I like being able to hold myself to account for this stuff at the end of the year – and so here it is:| Catherine Howe
