Beth Offenbacker

Beth is a strategic public involvement practitioner with more than 20 years experience working with public agencies, private firms and nonprofits/NGOs on a broad variety of stakeholder processes, projects and issues. A talented university instructor with more than eight years of practice-oriented teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Beth's PublicDecisions classes marry a passion for skill building with an interest in enhancing individual and organizational effectiveness. She is a Life Member of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) and a member of the American Planning Association and the American Society for Training and Development. Beth presently is leading a three-year, twelve-country study funded by IAP2 and the Kettering Foundation that explores the cultural context of public participation and deliberation, the findings of which will be released in August 2008 at the IAP2 annual conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Dexter Albert

Dexter is the founder of Intrinsic Consulting, LLC, a public involvement, citizen outreach, and stakeholder facilitation firm headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, and specializing in environmental, community infrastructure, and transportation issues. He is a Navajo tribal member and traditionalist, with ties to the Hopi Reservation and experience with many tribes and rural communities in the Southwest and across the US.

Dexter has presented at a variety of conferences and symposia throughout the US, most recently at the 2007 Navajo Transportation Conference in Albuquerque. With a master's degree in progress, he also holds a certificate from IAP2 for public involvement training.

Stephen Few

Steven is considered the world's leading expert in the use of data visualization for analyzing and presenting quantitative business information. He is founder and principal of the consulting firm Perceptual Edge, which builds upon his 25 years experience as an information technology innovator, teacher, and consultant. An instructor in the MBA program at U.C. Berkeley and frequent presenter at conferences, he also writes the monthly Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter. Steven is the author of two popular books, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten and Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, and is working on a third, tentatively titled Now You See It: Simple Graphing Techniques for Making Sense of Quantitative Information. You can learn more about Stephen's work at PerceptualEdge.com.

John Godec

John is president of Godec, Randall & Associates Inc., a consulting firm that manages difficult, dicey, high stakes communication, public involvement, crisis, and conflict resolution. He is the former Director of Issues Management for Motorola Corporation, and served as Special Assistant to the Director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. Godec is a Certified Professional Facilitator©, a board member and master trainer for the International Association for Public Participation, and a roster member of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution. He has worked and taught in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, and Australasia.

Sara Nora Ross, Ph.D.

Dr. Ross brings to PublicDecisions more than 20 years experience teaching, designing, training, and facilitating for large and small groups in educational and public settings, including in recent years distance learning for practitioners, consultants, and other professionals. As a practitioner and an action researcher (independently and for the Kettering Foundation), she has worked with approximately one thousand citizens and officials in her career. She founded ARINA, Inc., a global nonprofit for education, research, and the public good, and developed The Integral Process for Working on Complex Issues (TIP) based on her research, practice, and analyses of many issues.

Martha Rozelle, Ph.D.

Dr. Marty Rozelle has designed and conducted public participation programs for site selection of sanitary landfills, dams and reservoirs, nuclear waste repositories, highways, high-voltage transmission lines, and power plants, and has implemented community relations programs for numerous hazardous waste cleanup investigations. Marty led the 2 1/2-year public involvement program for the Central Arizona Water Control Study (a Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers project), which resulted in concensus among 120 stakeholder entities for building a new dam and raising an existing one. Recently, she facilitated public workshops as part of the scoping meetings for the Grand Canyon Colorado River Management Plan revision. Other experiences include: reaching widespread agreement among ten citizen task forces as to the cost of alleviating social and economic impacts in the construction of a 1500 MW power plant in Nevada; building support among landowners and elected officials for a 1900-mile natural gas pipeline corridor from British Columbia to Chicago; developing a strategy for gaining public acceptance of a nuclear plant in South Korea; and directing a comprehensive public consultation program for the City of Calgary's long-range transportation plan. Marty is a founder and past president of the International Association for Public Participation.

John Stephens, Ph.D.

Dr. Stephens is Associate Professor of Public Administration and Government at the University of North Carolina School of Government. Before entering academia, he was research director of the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management. John has also managed political campaigns, worked for a congressman, and lobbied for the Home Builders Association of St. Louis. His publications include Guidebook to Public Dispute Resolution in North Carolina and Public Management Bulletin: Using a Mediator in Public Disputes. He is co-author of Reaching for Higher Ground: Tools for Powerful Groups and Communities; Listening to Citizens: County Commissioners on the Road; and School Funding Disputes: Mediate, Don't Litigate. He is also editor of Popular Government and co-chair of the Environment and Public Policy Section, Association for Conflict Resolution.

Nick Wates, Bsc Arch (Hons)

Nick is the Director of Nick Wates Associates, a community planning firm based in the UK. A leading authority on community participation in planning and architecture, he has participated in and chronicled its development for over 30 years as an independent author, practitioner, and teacher. He is Site Editor of The Community Planning Website, which grew from his popular Community Planning Handbook (Earthscan, 2000). Other books include Community Architecture (Penguin, 1987) and The Community Planning Event Manual (Earthscan, 2008). Nick has facilitated numerous practical community engagement projects in the UK and overseas. His teaching experience includes setting up a Community Planning Training & Development Programme with 17 one-day training modules for The Prince's Foundation.