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

Bill Moyers on Buying the War

If you get a chance, I highly recommend viewing the first episode of Bill Moyers' new program Journal, entitled Buying the War, especially as it is availabl…

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You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil

Shankar Vedantam in the Post: "Opponents of the war believe passionately that President Bush, his neoconservative allies and a complicit Congress deliberat…

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Optimal email animals

It's not unusual to find periodic columns decrying how technology is undermining the authenticity of human interactions, but it is relatively unusual to hea…

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diagram of a blog

Very clever Op-Art from Paula Scher and the NYT (hat tip to Diane)…

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Blogging Code of Conduct

Lots of buzz on the internets today about Tim O'Reilly's proposed Blogging Code of Conduct...  My opinion: It's about damn time. The conversation r…

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Anger and video games

This is the first discussion of this oft-emotional topic that I feel corresponds to my first hand experience... "Study finds stable personalities unaffecte…

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The banality of heroism

Philip Zimbardo: "Heroes come in two main casts; life-long heroes, like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and heroes of the moment…

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God is on our side

Lee Dye on ABC News: "Does believing that "God is on our side" make it easier for us to inflict pain and suffering on those perceived to be our e…

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Kiva in the NYT

Great coverage for them, and kudos to Kristof for the feature... "On a muddy street in Kabul, Abdul Satar, a bushy-bearded man of 64, was sitting in the wi…