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

Blog

How to stop it

Via my good friend Sanjana, some observations from Jonathan Zittrain's new book The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It): "Though these two inve…

Blog

Credit where credit is due

A trademark Brooks turnaround in today's column: "...big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere…

Blog

The End of History on Acid

David Brooks in Friday's Times: "Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transform…

Blog

a universal language

Jeff Goldfien in the ADRNC Newsletter: "I was struck by a statement by Senator Obama, reported in the press yesterday, responding to an accusation by conse…

Blog

Keeping Up With The Joneses

From Elizabeth Gudrais' cover story in Harvard Magazine (hat tip to Minh): "The United States is becoming even more unequal as income becomes more conc…

Blog

More like Monkeys

Roy Baumeister in Psychology Today: "Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys..." "Keith C…

Blog

A trillion trillion possibilities

David Brooks in today's New York Times: "Studies designed to link specific genes to behavior have failed to find anything larger than very small associ…

Blog

Self-flattery

David Frum in the NYT Book Review: "You do not need to be a partisan of a political movement to write its history. But you do need enough imaginative sympa…

Blog

Paradoxical Attitudes Toward Privacy

My friend Sanjana sent me an interesting blog post from the NYT today on privacy. Brad Stone: "We all cherish our privacy. Then we go and divulge everythin…

Blog

A credo for facilitators

Peter Adler, head of the Keystone Center and a giant in the field of dispute resolution, recently published a great "credo for facilitators" that he f…

Blog

New Version of Frontline SMS

Last week my friend Ken Banks (of kiwanja.net) launched the latest version of FrontlineSMS, a text messaging platform geared at servicing the needs of the grass…

Blog

We are all the Grateful Dead

Paul Krugman in the June 6 NYT: "...The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they en…