Matthew Shapiro is an independent researcher, writer, and community organizer with a longstanding interest in our collective capacity for dialogue, participatory democracy, and the participatory design of social systems. He has more than three decades of experience in working to bridge theories of participatory democracy and design with practice at the neighborhood level and in the arenas of education, community engagement, and local governance. This work drew the attention and support of leading thinkers, including virologist Jonas Salk, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and participatory design pioneer Bela H. Banathy. A former teacher, he founded an innovative community-based charter school, where he taught the middle school group. He then went through the doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction at Boise State University, where his focus was on the barriers to systemic change in education. Published works include numerous critical research reports, workbooks to assist in public participation in educational design, and articles and book chapters spanning the social sciences. These include articles in The Eastern Anthropologist and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, and invited chapters in Dialogue as a Means of Collective Communication and other books. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he has called Boise, Idaho home for the past thirty years.