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

The Controversy over Walt/Mearsheimer

Over the past few weeks, no one who pays any attention to the contemporary dialogues in political science could have escaped hearing about the controversy surro…

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Learning from our ancestors

Jane Goodall was interviewed in the most recent Sierra magazine about her latest work focusing on people, not chimpanzees: "Sierra: What has your many yea…

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How to Succeed in Punditry

Ezra Klein on the art of being a pundit: "Punditry is a game of incentives, encouragement, luck. You write a hundred articles before striking paydirt with…

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The Battle for Peace

General Anthony Zinni, the former commander in charge of U.S. Central Command, was on Meet the Press a week ago, speaking about the Iraq war and his new book, T…

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Religious Identity Isn't Destiny

Amartya Sen has a piece on Slate talking about the limitations of Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.  In fact, it's an essay drawn…

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The Hitler Analogy

Katrina Vanden Heuvel has a good piece in the Washington Post today entitled "Update Our Insults: New Names to Call" (March 26, 2006; Page B03).  It b…

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Altruism as an evil

From Craig Biddle's Introduction to the new journal The Objective Standard: "Altruism is not good for one’s life. If accepted and practiced consistent…

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UN ODR Working Group Meeting

I'm off to the United Nations Online Dispute Resolution Working Group Meeting in Cairo in a couple minutes, so there will be some radio silence on the blog…

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The roots of hatred

This is a Christian Science Monitor piece by Peter Ford from 2001, but it rings almost truer now than it probably did at the time: '...in a broader sense,…

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Craigslist and the wisdom of crowds

Interesting exchange during SXSW between Craig Newmark and Jimmy Wales: '...communities like Craigslist and Wikipedia depend entirely on the general trustw…