I am a consultant who specializes in public participation, policy research, strategic planning, and evaluation. I served as Deputy Director of Everyday Democracy from 1998 to 2009, and led the project to develop this Issue Guide Exchange. I've been interested in how to create issue guides for public discussion since my years as a program officer and director of research at the Kettering Foundation (1985-93). While at Kettering I contributed to the development of about two-dozen issue guides and helped create the first "issue framing workshops" designed to teach people how to prepare their own issue guides using the "choice work" approach to public deliberation. During my time as a Fulbright Scholar in 1993-94 I introduced these issue framing workshops to civic organizations in Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia. Following my time at Kettering, I did a two-year stint as a project manager at The Harwood Institute. One of my favorite research projects from my time with Rich Harwood resulted in a study called "Will Any Kind of Talk Do?" that described how people use their everyday conversations to connect their personal concerns to public issues. I and my colleagues at Everyday Democracy continue to use insights from this type of research -- and from our experiences working with hundreds of large-scale dialogue-to-action initiatives -- to figure out how public dialogue and deliberation can best support attempts to address our most important public challenges.