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

New Blog Format

Well CIS has just launched their natty new blog system, based on Drupal... It'll take some time getting used to it, I suppose, but the design is quite fetch…

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Civility vs. honesty?

My short post from the other day got noticed by a few folks over at Whiskey Fire, so they responded to my brief observation with a few observations of their own…

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Ridiculing civility

The New York Times had an interesting article over the weekend talking about the tense stalemate that exists between liberals and conservatives in everyday inte…

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Piecing our country back together

Andrew Sullivan is one of the most thoughtful bloggers out there, and if you haven't seen what's been going on in his thinking lately it's worth che…

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Fewer guns, more talk

From an article by Miriam Pemberton in Foreign Policy in Focus: "In 2000, the Gallup organization recorded a 65% majority among Republicans, Democrats, an…

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Concerned Mediators Statement

At the Consolidating Our Wisdom Conference that I attended in Keystone, Colorado at the beginning of October, a group of mediators crafted a Senior Mediators…

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The forward-looking campaign

Kevin Sweeney, a visiting faculty member at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, had a great Op Ed in the Times on Monday entitled Running With Blinders.  A…