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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Blog tagged!

Over the holiday I got blog tagged by Colette in this ever-expanding game of 5 things, so I'm going to follow through and post five things that most people…

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Insisting upon ideological purity

Mitt Romney's campaign keeps getting tripped up on the ample evidence that he's been more moderate than his current campaign rhetoric would suggest.  Fr…

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Obama: a unifer, not a divider

Tom Friedman on Meet the Press yesterday: "Barack Obama’s great strength right now is the country is so tired of being divided. Deliberately divided, OK,…

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Changing tenor in the blogosphere

One of the noisiest partisans out there, Atrios, has indicated in a post on his blog that his relentless cynicism may be thawing slightly: "I suppose it&#…

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Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?

From David Pogue in the New York Times: 'The deeper we sail into the new online world of communications, the sadder I get about its future. I’m OK with cr…

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Uncivil War on E. 73rd

a piece by Ron Stodghill in yesterday's New York Times: "The mold dispute is the latest salvo in what, according to New York housing officials, is one…

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Utopian faith in the power of negotation

Thomas B. Edsall in the Times on Dec. 5th: "After 40 years of ascendancy, the G.O.P. has provided Democrats with an opening. Will the Democratic Party, of…

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A bad marriage with monuments

Richard Cohen in the Post on Tuesday: "Washington is a bad marriage with monuments. Just to get through the day, it's necessary to lower voices, modul…

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Faux bipartisanship?

David Sirota: "...is the real problem afflicting our political system a lack of so-called "bipartisanship" or is it actually too much bipartisan…

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SF Half Marathon / Team in Training

I've just joined the Silicon Valley Team in Training chapter to train for a half marathon this Spring. All Team in Training members commit to raise funds a…

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The Difficult Dialogues Initiative

Frank Dukes just put out a notice on the Environment and Public Policy section (a section of the Association for Conflict Resolution) listserv an interting note…