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 is currently director of dispute resolution for ebay.com.
Previously, Colin co-founded Online Resolution, an online dispute resolution (ODR) provider, in 1999 and served as its CEO (2000) and President (2001). Before this, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA.
Colin has presented and trained throughout Europe and North America for organizations including the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Department of State, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the Center for Public Resources. He has also lectured and taught at UMass-Amherst, Bentley College, MIT, Southern Methodist University, the University of Ottawa, Lasell College, and Brandeis University.
Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, due for publication by Jossey-Bass in the second half of 2002. He has contributed more than 30 articles to prestigious ADR publications such as Consensus, The Fourth R, ACR News, and Peace Review. He authors the online conflict resolution column in ACResolution Magazine and serves as editor of ODRNews.com, a daily news resource chronicling developments in the ODR field. 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 has completed advanced coursework in dispute resolution at the University of Massachusetts- Boston.
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