Board of Directors

Colin Rule

Colin Rule is Director of Online Dispute Resolution for PayPal. He has worked in the dispute resolution field for more than fifteen years as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. He is currently Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass-Amherst and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

Colin co-founded Online Resolution, one of the first online dispute resolution (ODR) providers, in 1999 and served as its CEO (2000) and President. In 2002 Colin co-founded the Online Public Disputes Project, which applied ODR to multiparty, public disputes. Previously, Colin was General Manager of Mediate.com, the largest online resource for the dispute resolution field. Colin also worked for several years with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C. and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA.

Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business, published by Jossey-Bass in September 2002. He has contributed more than 50 articles to prestigious ADR publications such as Consensus, The Fourth R, ACResolution, and Peace Review. He has also lectured and taught at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UMass-Amherst, Creighton University, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Ottawa.

He holds an MA from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in conflict resolution and technology, a Graduate Certificate in Dispute Resolution from UMass-Boston, a BA in Peace Studies from Haverford College, and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea from 1995-1997.