Via my friend Colin Rule comes news of a new conflict resolution blog published by Sanjana Hattotuwa, ICT for Peacebuilding, created as a medium for exploring “the use of Information Communications Technology (ICT) and its possible uses in conflict transformation and peacebuilding.”

Sanjana’s work breaks revolutionary new ground. As he puts it,

ICT is often associated with e-commerce or e-govenrment. A couple of years ago, when I first proposed possible linkages between ICT and peacebuilding, there weren’t many who took me seriously.

That’s changed with time.

ICT4Peace, though as yet embryonic, is soon gaining currency as an important field that’s distinct from other related domains of ICT, such as governance.

I helped setup InfoShare to pursue some of the possibilities of using ICT for peace in Sri Lanka in 2003. The on-the-ground experience of using technology in support of an on-going peace process is one that was without historical precedence or parallel.

Using this experience, I conducted my research in Australia on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), ICT and Peacebuilding. Throught my research, I explored ideas to bring together these seemingly diverse fields of theory and practice into a new spheres of collaboration.

At around this time, I was also introdoced [sic] to Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) - another interesting use of technology to resolve commercial disputes. My growing interest in ODR led me to push the boundaries of its theory and application - introducing it to the complex domains of ethno-political conflict and strategically envisioning future scenarios for ODR…

This blog is an attempt to cover issues on a regular basis that are of interest to me and a visionary and practitioner of ICT4Peace.

To view more of Sanjana’s research, visit his website.

Technorati tags: Blogging, conflict resolution, mediation, mediation blogs, online dispute resolution, technology

The internet, with its endless capacity for facilitating community and collaboration, has increasingly become a place of complex social interactions, where real-world transactions are negotiated through the medium of cyberspace and where virtual worlds emerge complete with laws, social norms, currencies, political structures, and economies.

But virtual worlds are more than just mere entertainment. They can serve as effective teaching tools as well.

Socialstudygames.com reports that the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy has announced finalists in their “Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games” Awards. Finalists as reported on the USC web site are:

Exchanging Cultures, a diplomatic game built inside “Second Life,” was created to facilitate the creating virtual communities and relationships based on the exchange of cultural items like: dances, art crafts, food receipts, architectural models, clothing, cultural routes and images of real original places for travelers and explorers.LINK.

Global Kids Island: Fostering Public Diplomacy Through Second Life Global Kids, Inc. envisioned a Public Diplomacy program within Second Life where the youth in the after-school program will spend the month learning about a global issue, experience an interactive and experiential workshop designed to educate about the issue. Their demonstration will be shown at the awards ceremony. For more information on the organization: LINK

Hydro Hijinks is a class project designed to promote discussion about international water issues and to educate players from around the world about sources of international conflict over water rights. Watch the video tour of the game at: LINK

Peacemaker is a cross-cultural political video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which can be used to promote a peaceful resolution among Israelis, Palestinians and young adults worldwide. More information, please visit their website: LINK

Winners will be announced at a ceremony on May 8.

USC is currently involved itself in a Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project designed to “explore how virtual worlds can be used as effective tools to bridge cultural gaps, to foster new ways to resolve conflict, and to learn and teach new skills in dealing with each other to build a better world.”

In addition to these projects, the gang at odr.info recently reported on the outstanding efforts of one inventive team of peer mediation educators, Jennifer Nieto and Peggy Ward, to utilize Second Life, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (a virtual world in which numerous participants can interact simultaneously), as a tool for enabling high school students to role play in mediation simulations and practice mediation skills in a non-threatening virtual environment. (I was totally psyched to discover a link to Online Guide to Mediation on their site, for which I am most grateful.)

Technorati tags: peer mediation, virtual worlds, Culture and Society, Internet, online dispute resolution, conflict resolution

Where would mediators be without controversy and conflict? In a way it’s ironic that the work we do might ultimately put us all out of business if only we do it well enough.

Speaking of controversy, especially the intractable kind, few state court opinions in recent years have sparked as much controversy both locally and nationally as did Goodrich v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision which held that the Massachusetts Constitution forbids the Commonwealth from denying the benefits and protections of civil marriage to same-sex couples.

Opponents of gay marriage in Massachusetts wasted no time in circulating an initiative petition to define marriage as the union of a man and woman, which Attorney General Tom Reilly, in a highly disputed move, subsequently certified to appear on the November 2008 state ballot.

Supporters of same-sex marriage have fired their own shot across the marital bow in filing Johanna Schulman v. Thomas Reilly et al., a civil action for declaratory relief relating to this petition with the Supreme Judicial Court, which will hear arguments in this matter at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, May 4, 2006.

Webcasts of oral arguments, including this one, are viewable online at the Suffolk University Law School web site at http://www.suffolk.edu/sjc/.

Last night an esteemed colleague kindly emailed me the following quote, attributed to Sandra Day O’Connor:

The courts of this country should not be the places where resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end after alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.

I think that many of us–alternative dispute resolution professionals, lawyers, and ordinary citizens–would wholeheartedly agree.

Justice O’Connor’s words acquire special meaning just one day after Harvard Law Professor Frank Sander, a pioneering leader of the modern alternative dispute resolution movement, was honored for his numerous contributions to the ADR field.

Thirty years ago, Chief Justice Warren Burger invited Professor Sander to present a paper at the Roscoe Pound Conference of 1976, a historic gathering of legal scholars and jurists brought together to discuss ways to address popular dissatisfaction with the American legal system and reform the administration and delivery of justice. Sander’s paper, “The Pound Conference: Perspectives on Justice in the Future“, profoundly influenced and transformed both ADR and the American legal system. It has in many ways acquired the status of a sacred text for ADR professionals; it is at once history and cultural narrative.

Sander reminded conference participants of the limitations of traditional litigation with its “use of a third party with coercive power, the usually ‘win or lose’ nature of the decision, and the tendency of the decision to focus narrowly on the immediate matter in issue as distinguished from a concern with the underlying relationship between the parties.” He urged conference participants to envision alternatives, a “rich variety of different processes, which, I would submit, singly or in combination, may provide far more ‘effective’ conflict resolution.” And he reminded them of “the central quality of mediation”, namely “its capacity to reorient the parties toward each other, not by imposing rules on them, but by helping them to achieve a new and shared perception of their relationship, a perception that will redirect their attitudes and dispositions toward one another.”

Sander was one of those early pioneers who blazed rocky trails that 30 years later are now well-traveled roads. The institutionalization of ADR is virtually complete. No longer novel and revolutionary, ADR has become commonplace, woven tightly into the fabric of legal, commercial, workplace, community, academic, and civic interactions.

This large-scale integration of ADR, however, as largely positive as it has been, has unfortunately produced problems of its own.

In an age of tort reform and mandatory arbitration clauses, ADR has been exploited as a means of concealing civil wrong or criminal misconduct or preventing the powerless from seeking justice against the powerful, as this recent article from NorthJersey.com reminded me. (For a full analysis of this issue, please see this post from March 2005, “The company we keep: ADR, tort reform, and the erosion of justice” (selected last month as a Gather.com Editor’s Pick), issued as a call to arms to my profession and a rebuke to those few misguided mediators who all too eagerly denounce litigation as an unnecessary evil).

Thirty years after the groundbreaking Pound Conference is a good time for perspective taking as the ADR field advances into the 21st century. It’s an opportunity to remember our roots.

ADR was founded on notions of greater access to justice for all, improved satisfaction with dispute resolution processes, and meaningful choices for resolving disputes in mutually satisfying ways. Sander and those early pioneers envisioned a multi-door courthouse, with doors swinging wide open to a broad range of dispute resolution processes, where disputes could be efficiently addressed through the mechanism best suited for the parties and the issues involved.

Sanders emphasized the need “to reserve the courts for those activities for which they are best suited and to avoid swamping and paralyzing them with cases that do not require their unique capabilities”. At the same time, Sander recognized the legitimacy of the “need to retain the courts as the ultimate agency capable of effectively protecting the rights of the disadvantaged”.

These should remain our bedrock principles. Justice, like ADR, must remain accessible, to the powerless and the powerful alike. Otherwise alternative dispute resolution ceases to be an alternative at all. As ADR professionals, let us work to keep the multiple doors wide open–before they slam shut in the faces of those who are most vulnerable.

Technorati tags: ADR, alternative dispute resolution, Law, Mediation

Here in America, in a political climate which increasingly abandons the reasoned debate and factual analysis that once characterized public discourse in favor of logical fallacies, cheap appeals to emotion, and personal attacks, there is evidently little popular support for intelligent dialogue between political parties, let alone between the U.S. and its adversaries abroad.

Against that backdrop, a question that emerges time and again is, “Should we negotiate with terrorists?” In the public imagination, negotiation has unfortunately come to be synonymous with compromise, appeasement, and weakness, and the answer for many here is “no”.

In his latest edition of Negotiating Tip of the Week, Josh Weiss poses and ponders exactly that kind of tough question. He begins by challenging the popular definition of negotiation and proposing instead one that mediators will be familiar with.

To join Josh in asking what it means to negotiate with extremists, listen to his podcast here. As always, Josh welcomes listener input, along with ideas for future programs. This is one place on the web at least where public discourse remains welcome.

Technorati tags: conflict resolution, negotiation, Mediation

As a Boston-area attorney-mediator, I experienced some home-team pride to learn that Boston lawyer Brandy Karl is hosting this week’s Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in law blogging, over at her blog, bk! (which has nothing to do with the fast food restaurant chain and everything to do with her work as an intellectual property attorney).

In pursuit of a theme, Brandy takes readers down the rabbit hole to Wonderland (that’s Wonderland as in Alice and not the subway station familiar to Boston public transit commuters).

(Blawg Review of course isn’t just for lawyers. There’s something in it for mediators as well. Click here to get convinced. Blawg Review, incidentally, has been hosted twice now by mediators–once by me and once by retired mediator David Giacalone.)

We must be governed by the force of law, not by the law of force.

~ William Sloane Coffin, Jr., 1924 - 2006

My alma mater, Suffolk University Law School in Boston, is hosting a group of visiting mediators and mediation program administrators from Bulgaria who are here on a twelve-day study tour under the sponsorship of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

This tour furthers the efforts of USAID’s Commercial Law Reform Program (CLRP) to promote access to and use of mediation to alleviate the strain on Bulgarian’s underfunded and overburdened judiciary (a problem which will have the ring of familiarity to American jurists). CLRP has worked closely with Bulgaria to help it develop its capacity to provide court-connected mediation services. A legal framework supporting mediation is in place, which includes a Mediation Act enacted in December 2004, comprehensive procedural and ethical rules of conduct for mediators, and mediation training standards.

In addition, last year the 110-year-old Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) with the support of USAID opened a Commercial Mediation Center in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, with the goal of promoting the use of mediation as a time- and cost-saving measure.

This study tour was developed by and is under the supervision of Gabrielle Gropman, a mediator with over two decades of experience, who served as the administrator of the Harvard Mediation Program at Harvard Law School for 20 years and who possesses substantial experience as a trainer in both the U.S. and Europe.

Chief trainer is my friend and colleague Ericka Gray, who, among her many achievements, served as the founding Executive Director of the Middlesex Multi-Door Courthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later as the Executive Director of the Academy of Family Mediators, one of the organizations which later became the Association for Conflict Resolution, before founding her dispute resolution firm DisputEd in 1998.

Participation in this study tour is designed to provide participants with advanced commercial mediation skills and techniques, strategies for the successful administration and financial operation of commercial mediation programs, techniques for training commercial mediators, and the opportunity to establish ties with mediators and mediation service providers here in the U.S.

For two days this week I was privileged to join the study tour as Ericka’s co-trainer teaching these distinguished visitors from Bulgaria advanced commercial mediation skills. Vastly knowledgeable about mediation, deeply committed to its precepts, and rooted squarely in its theory and practice, they had much to teach us as well.

The impression that has remained with me today as I reflect on my time with these extraordinary individuals is the degree to which mediation has become a universal language, an idiom that all of us who are mediators speak and share.

For more information on mediation in Bulgaria, visit the web site for the Mediation Center at the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Technorati tags: mediation, Culture and Society

We mediation trainers tend to be Luddites when it comes to the tools of our trade. Most of us would rather use flipcharts and markers than PowerPoint slides and LCD projectors any day of the week.

Flipcharts you can stick all over the walls to mark your group’s progress or to refer back to easily to reinforce concepts. Flipcharts encourage spontaneity and the free flow of ideas, enabling trainers to involve students in creating the content of the flipchart pages. PowerPoint presentations, on the other hand, seem static and contrived in comparison. I use both, but I think you can guess what my preference is.

The downside, of course, to flipcharts is that you can’t easily photocopy them for distribution or email them to your students–not unless you or someone else painstakingly transcribes them. There is a solution, however, for those of us who seek ways to integrate 21st technology into 20th century practices.

Via the excellent blog NevilleHobson.com comes this post about scanR, an application that, in the words of its web site, “uses advanced imaging processing and data extraction technologies to convert photos into legible, searchable PDF files”. Using a camera phone or digital camera, you simply photograph a document, whiteboard, or flipchart, email your photo off to scanR, and receive back via email your photograph converted into universally accessible PDF format which you can then forward to your group. You can try it (and use it, if my eyes don’t deceive me) for free.

Of course for more tech tools that even anti-modernist mediators will love, be sure to visit Tammy Lenski’s Mediator Tech.

Technorati tags: mediation training, technology

When it comes to solving problems, the internet can be a sure-fire (and inexpensive) way to reach out and access the collective wisdom of the web-surfing multitudes. Since Sliced Bread is one such experiment in tapping into the wisdom of crowds. It describes itself as “a national call for fresh, common sense ideas. A call for ideas that will strengthen our economy and improve the day-to-day lives of working men and women and their families.”

To commemorate Earth Day, which is celebrated tomorrow, Since Sliced Bread is seeking help finding and tagging ideas to conserve energy and promote the environment.

(By the way, in honor of Earth Day, take this quiz to determine your ecological footprint, courtesy of the Earth Day Network web site. And maybe you want to think about trading in that Hummer while you’re at it.)

Technorati tags: creativity, problem solving

Here’s a reminder to long-time subscribers and news for first-time visitors to this blog.

If you have a blog or a web site devoted to alternative dispute resolution, mediation, conflict management, negotiation, or if you publish a blog that regularly features posts about mediation or ADR, please sign yourself up to be listed at any or all of the following web sites:

Directory of Alternative Dispute Resolution Blogs

Currently this directory, a mediation blog work in progress which I launched just last month, lists 30 alternative dispute resolution and negotiation blogs, together with blogs that are mediation-friendly, across eight different categories. If you’d like your blog listed here, let me know. My hope is to do for ADR blogs what Blawg.org did for law blogs–a madcap scheme, I know, but, hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?

Alternative Dispute Resolution Web Ring

Anyone who owns a piece of Internet real estate–a blog, a web site, a wiki, a directory, an online community–devoted to ADR, mediation, conflict resolution, negotiation, you name it—can request a listing here. You can even upload a small image to appear next to your listing when you sign up.

For more details, you can visit the ADR Web Ring Portal, or go straight to the web ring itself.

Map of the Alternative Dispute Resolution World

Put yourself on the Map of the Alternative Dispute Resolution World, where you can post a message and add a link back to your web site or blog. (It’s also fun to see where around the globe your fellow mediators hang out.) This guestmap is not as populated as I’d like to see it–my goal is to have all continents (yes, including Antarctica) represented.

Listing on all of these sites is free of course–just a link back is all I ask.

Technorati tags: Blogging, mediation blogs, mediation, mediators, online guide to mediation, Internet

Today marks the day that all Americans fear and despise: Tax Day. It’s our national day of reckoning with the Infernal Internal Revenue Service.

Enthusiasts of the Internal Revenue Code will want to visit this week’s Blawg Review, ably and entertainingly hosted by Villanova University School of Law Professor James Maule, whose expertise encompasses among other things the arcane mysteries of tax law.

Of particular interest to me as a history-loving taxpayer was the link from this edition of Blawg Review to the 1913 version of the U.S. tax filing form. (By way of comparison, here’s the 2005 version many taxpayers will be filing today.)

Every journey begins with a single step. In the case of Canadian Kyle MacDonald, his began with a single red paper clip.

Kyle, who could teach the contestants on the reality show Unan1mous a thing or two about negotiating, decided to barter his way from a red paper clip to a house, using a series of upward trades to move closer to his goal, which now looks increasingly attainable.

You can read about Kyle’s adventures in bargaining here at his web site, One Red Paperclip.

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

~ Saul Alinsky

Technorati tags: mediation quotes, conflict resolution

Devotees of the law will not want to miss the first anniversary edition of Blawg Review, the weekly review of the best in law blogging, hosted by law blog poet laureate (and retired mediator) David Giacolone. David, whose highly creative law blog is celebrated for its “one-breath poetry & breathless punditry”, in the words of Blawg Review, delivers up plenty of witty commentary and the haiku his blog is known for.

Baseball fans (who all have a little poetry in their souls) should also take time to explore David’s baseball haiku. Sweetly evocative, these haiku will undoubtedly summon up the smell of hot dogs and mustard together with childhood memories of neighborhood pick-up games. My own favorite:

a long fly ball
arcs above the moon…
summer deepens