Reporter - Patty Dineen

Patty Dineen has been convening and moderating National Issues Forums (NIF) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and other areas since 1994. She is one of the instructors at the NIF Public Policy Institute (now called the Deliberative Democracy Workshop) held each June in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She has assisted with large deliberative forum efforts including the Philadelphia Inquirers Citizen Voices project, the Philadelphia Education Summit, Common Ground in Akron Ohio and the ongoing End of Life Partnership of Western Pennsylvania Community Forums project.

Patty does free-lance writing concentrating on science and political topics and has recently completed work on an issue book for the American Bar Association and the Kettering Foundation about public trust and the American justice system.

In addition to her writing and NIF work, Patty works part-time in the Division of Education at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and lives in Gibsonia with her husband and four children.