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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Martin Luther King Day

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Where are the American heroes of today? From his speech "The…

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American conservatism and soft utopianism

Jeffery Hart had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday characterizing the core tenets of American conservatism.  It does a very good job presentin…

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Rancor in Scarborough Country

After a recent contentious panel with Christopher Hitchens that dissolved into an embarrassing shouting match, Joe Scarborough delivered a little eplilogue apol…

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International Perspectives on the U.S.

Marjane Satrapi has a great hand-illustrated piece in the New York Times about perspectives on the U.S. in modern day France: http://satrapi.page.nytimes.com/b…

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What happened to American humility?

Ira Williams has posted a great article (beautifully laid out in a PDF, btw) on ChangeThis called "Speak Softly."  Definitely worth a read. http://ch…

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Habitat JAM

There's a very cool global, participatory exercise happening yesterday, today, and tomorrow called Habitat JAM.  It's being sponsored by the UN, the gov…

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"Teach Peace" as a political slogan

I think I can see how conflict resolution is being politicized, and why it is raising the hackles of some on the political right.  Those who opposed the war are…

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Fellows Lunch at Stanford Today

On Monday I got to attend a lunch Lauren and Jennifer hosted for all the CIS fellows at the Stanford Faculty Club.  Wow, what an incredible group!  I sat at the…

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Understanding the Other Side

I'm always on the lookout for figures in the media who eschew the common horse-race, zero-sum paradigms that dominate the public sphere these days in favor…

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The $100 Laptop

Well, it looks like Negroponte has done it... "A prototype of a cheap and robust laptop for pupils has been welcomed as an "expression of global soli…