Stanford CIS

Colin Rule

Non-Residential Fellow

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 Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass-Amherst. 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.

Recent articles

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A hopeful sign

It seems we have a very narrow window open right now to rebuild relations between red and blue America.  I was very impressed to see this post on the progressiv…

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Crossing over

Eric Hirshberg in the Huffington Post: "There are a number of people in my life -- some family, some friends, some colleagues -- with whom I have never agr…

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All too human

David Brooks in today's NYT: "money was entrusted to a few thousand traders who sloshed it around the world in search of the highest returns... These…

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An ideologue is an ideologue

Jacques Berlinerblau in the Washington Post's On Faith section: "Maher, a talented stand-up performer, is simply not skilled at, or comfortable with, r…

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Ideology > facts

Jonathan M. Gitlin on Ars Technica: "We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the…

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A little respect

There's an interesting subtext to some of the recent developments in the presidential election: the centrality of respect. I've long thought that one o…

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Permeable minds

At the risk of making this blog look like merely another distribution channel for his column, David Brooks in today's NYT: "...this individualist descr…