This is just a short intro to this blog to explain what its about.  Its also a bit of a user guide for people I work with so you can understand what I am doing here.

It started as effectively the field notes for my doctoral research.  As I was researching social media it felt important to be part of it and after a bit of trial and error it became the place where I shared my work in progress and where I published all the initial pieces that went into the first draft of my thesis (which ended up taking about 8 drafts to finish but we got there in the end).  The community I found here was so massively support as critical friends and cheerleaders to that work I can honestly say I would not have completed the PhD without them – so if you are still reading THANK YOU.

Writing and thinking is now part of how I work and while I don’t have the discipline I had during the PhD I do tend to use this as a space to explore ideas and to put my views into the world – its my little corner of the public sphere.  I tend to tag the posts as ‘thinking out loud’ or ‘open practice’ as thats exactly what I am doing and I see it is on the periphery of the excellent weeknotes community that you can see around LocalGov digital.

I’m conscious however that because my work and my thinking are again happily closely aligned it can be confusing for people I work with – and I’ve been reflecting on the fact that the more senior you are the more likely that it causes confusion.  The main thing to undedrstand is that what I write here is unfiltered by internal conversations, planning or indeed often practical considerations and unless I say explicitly it reflects my current view on something and things I am turning over in my head rather than something I think we will necessarily do.  If you do like what you read then let me know – similarly let me know of you don’t!

I’m posting this because I’m starting to write about the work we are doing at Adur and Worthing so I thought I useful to give context.  This is very early days for me to be writing about this as I am really only now starting to think my way into what we might do and so subject to change but there are some things I want to be thinking in the open on:

  •  a piece giving the background to the community asset mapping we are about to commission
  •  a reflection on the Thrive work that is central to the communities approach we are developing
  •  and this piece about multidisciplinary working

I plan to build on this over the coming months and this enquiry map offers a bit of a clue as to where I expect to go with this all.  Finally working out loud is to invite a conversation so please do get in touch if this sparks any thoughts.

Original source – Catherine Howe

Comments closed