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