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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Blowing the Horn

John Prendergast and Colin Thomas-Jensen in the March/April Foreign Affairs: "The Greater Horn of Africa, the hottest conflict zone in the world, is a legi…

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Defending Wikipedia’s Impolite Side

Noam Cohen in today's New York Times: "Before Mike Godwin became general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation last month, he was the subject of a Wikipe…

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Dick Cheney in 1994

Interesting how much one's perspective can change in 6 years. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I He so cleanly lays out all the arguments against,…

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Get your flame war on

"That's not an argument, it's just contradiction!" Take on BlogWarBot, the Automated Internet Politcal Argument: http://faultline.org/index.…

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ICT and Development / Crisis Response

I just traded emails with Paul Margie, a friend from college who now works at the United Nations Foundation.  He's set up several projects funded by Ted Tur…

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The Conciliator

I've wanted to post some thoughts arising from Larissa MacFarquhar's article on Obama ever since it came out in the May 7 New Yorker.  It offers some pa…

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Why do they hate us?

I found this piece by Mohsin Hamid in the Washington Post over the weekend particularly insightful (not only because it begins with a focus on my hometown.)  An…

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Every time I give up on David Brooks...

...he comes back and says something nuanced: "...most political and social disputes grow out of differing theories about the self, and I find Hofstadter’s…