Fifth International Forum on Online Dispute Resolution to be held April 19-20, 2007 in Liverpool
Posted by: Diane Levin in Events for Mediators, ODR
The Fifth International Forum on Online Dispute Resolution will be held in Liverpool, England, April 19-20, 2007. According to its web site,
This meeting builds on prior meetings in Geneva (2001 and 2002), held under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Council for Europe (UNECE), in Melbourne (2004) under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and in Cairo in 2006 in collaboration with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. Online dispute resolution is becoming a priority of governments desiring to promote ecommerce, economic growth and technological development. Online dispute resolution is necessary not only to resolve disputes that arise but to build trust in systems and reduce risk for persons and groups interested in investment and participation in online and cross-border activities. The Liverpool ODR Forum aims at providing an overview of the diverse ODR techniques, the prospects of ODR, as well as exploring and analyzing the necessity for developing and promoting ODR.
Graham Ross of TheClaimRoom.com, a chief organizer of this event, tells me that this two-day forum will include significant coverage of the use of technology in mediation.
Keynote speakers are Sir Brian Neill, Kt, PC, QC, former Lord Justice of Appeal and past President of the Civil Mediation Council, and Professor Richard Susskind, IT Advisor to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. Other participants include ODR notables such as Colin Rule, Ethan Katsh, and Sanjana Hattotuwo.
Registration, incidentally, is free. For further information on this Forum, please contact Graham Ross or Ethan Katsh.
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July 2nd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
I’m curious if these events are designed to focus on the various disputes that naturally arise when an international tool comes to involve participants in several individual nations, or if they have more to do with how to use online forums as a means of resolving disputes (of course, both may be applicable). Initially, in reading your post, it sounded like the former, but as I read on, the phrase “use of technology in mediating disputes” made it sound like the latter. I’m very interested, though, in what steps might be on the table for regulation of the internet across borders, or whether such regulation is even possible. There are, as you mention, so many aspects to the rise of disputes. To take something quite simple, what happens when the age of consent in Canada (16), comes up against the age of consent in (18) when it comes to online dating services? Presumably someone in North Dakota might be keenly interested in such discrepancies. And this does not even take into account the myriad economic problems that are possible when cross-national commerce is done over the internet.