ODR Section Editorial Fall 2000
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June 2000 |
As consumers and business come to expect that any service they need should be available online, 24 hours a day, they will push for the creation of ODR services. If the ADR field is hesitant to provide them, many outsiders won’t hesitate to rush into the space. Many observers believe transactions online soon reach into the trillions of dollars in value. These transactions will generate disputes, and particularly complicated ones at that. They will likely be conflicts that are over complex issues, transboundary in nature, multicultural, and between people who have never met each other.
But how do we deliver mediation services over a wire, when you can’t look into the parties’ eyes or shake their hands? Translating our offline ADR skills online is a formidable challenge. As we get comfortable with online communication we need to learn what we can and cannot do through our keyboards. The online environment offers many challenges, but it also opens up new possibilities for ADR that weren’t practical or even possible before, such as asynchronous communication and multiparty participation without respect to geography.
The ADR field should fully engage the challenges brought on by technology so that we can best meet the demand for these types of services. Using the decades of experience in our field we should strive to develop answers to the questions posed by online ADR: Does it work? What are best practices? What standards should be developed? How can we train people to do it? How can we prevent abuse? What technology needs to be developed to improve it?
I’m excited to serve as the editor for the ODR section at mediate.com, to facilitate some of the discussions focused on answering these questions and to act as an information clearinghouse for ODR news.
Please email me if you have any questions or ideas for content in this space (crule@mediate.com
Additional Links and information of interest.
Biography
Colin Rule has worked at the intersection of technology and conflict resolution for the last two decades. He is CEO of Modria.com, an online dispute resolution service provider in Silicon Valley, and a non-resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. From 2003 to 2011, he served as eBay and PayPal's first director of Online Dispute Resolution, designing and implementing systems that now resolve more than 60 million disputes each year. Mr. Rule is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002. He has presented and trained around the world for organizations including the U.S. Department of State, UNCITRAL, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution, as well as teaching at UMass-Amherst, Stanford, Southern Methodist University, and Hastings College of the Law. He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1999, with columns and articles appearing in ACResolution, Consensus, Dispute Resolution Magazine, and Peace Review. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and technology, a B.A. in peace studies from Haverford College, and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea from 1995-1997.
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