Catherine Howe, Operations Director, Public-i

Catherine Howe has worked with online communities and social networking tools for over 10 years. Initially working on developing learning applications at London Business School she was then a founder director of Etribes.com. While at etribes she developed a community creation methodology and implemented this with third sector organisations such as Christian Aid, YMCA and YHA.

More recently, Catherine has been working with local government bodies to help them make better use of multimedia tools to engage with citizens, with projects that support both formal democracy as well as mainstream communication such as WebTV. Her main interest is in looking at ways to convert the social networking noise into something useful and has recently started a PHD researching social impacts of Web 2.0 tools in a democratic context.