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

Off to eBay Live

So I'm off to eBay Live! in Vegas this week.  It's sold out for the first time -- all 15,000 slots were gone weeks ago.  We're having Huey Lewis and…

Blog

Pilgrim's Progress

From Russell Shorto's review of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War by Nathaniel Patrick: '"When violence and fear grip a society, th…

Blog

John McCain at the New School

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person in the world who noted the irony in the recent furor over John McCain’s address at the New School graduation.  McCain delivers…

Blog

ODR presentation at Hamline University

David Larson invited me to do a short presentation to his class at Hamline this afternoon, and it was fun to chat.  We did the video over MSN Messenger, which k…

Blog

City of Rhyme

When I was at the Kennedy School years ago I co-founded a non-profit with Barry Malin that focused on health issues among Latin American street kids called Shin…

Blog

ODR at the University of Haifa Law School

I did a presentation last night for my co-CITDR fellow Orna Rabinovich-Einy's class on Online Dispute Resolution at the University of Haifa Law School.  For…

Blog

John McCain at Liberty University

Lots of people are talking about John McCain's speech at Liberty University and how it signals that he's climbed off of the "Straight Talk Express&…

Blog

ICT4Peace

Sanjana Hattotuwa, a pioneer in the Online Dispute Resolution field, has started up a blog called "ICT for Peacebuilding" that explores the use of tec…