Creating Technology for Social Change

Liveblogging ODR 2013: ODR Beyond e-Commerce

Today and tomorrow I’ll be liveblogging from the 2013 Online Dispute Resolution Conference in Montreal. As with all liveblogs, this is a best-efforts summary of the panel; all insights are the panelists, and any errors are my own.

The next panel is Beyond eCommerce, moderated by Jeff Aresty, featuring Marie-Claude Asselin, Graham Ross, and Colin Rule.

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My friend Colin Rule leads off the panel with a talk titled “Workflow Process Management: The Next Frontier for ODR.” Colin was formerly the director of eBay and PayPal’s ODR system for nearly a decade, and now is the CEO and cofounder of Modria, a software-as-a-service platform for dispute resolution.

Colin and his cofounder Chittu both came out of eBay/Paypal with expertise and a lot of code to found Modria expecting to find a readymade market. However, as they’ve been talking with clients, they’ve found that most of them are concerned with fairly mundane but very painful processes, such as tax assessments.

Colin advocates an evolving understanding of ODR. When he started at eBay he originally approached it from an ADR perspective, and thought that low-dollar-value disputes between strangers would be uninteresting. But there were so many of them – tens of millions! – that scale became a problem all its own. Now, Colin begins his work from the perspective of the customer, meaning both the client to whom they are selling their software and also the constituents who will be using that software. Modria’s focus has shifted to just handling the most straightforward, boring, but massively inefficient painpoints in the workflow process. This is a different set of needs: not about “justice,” or “fairness,” but a focus on *delivery*, which better paves the pathways through which disputes can circulate.

Colin believes that part of the reason ODR has not grown as quickly as many expected is because ODR is not what customers think they want. Everyone thinks mediation is meditation. Everyone associates resolution with New Years. We are alienating our own customers with what we do – setting ourselves up as the guardians who alone know the complexities of doing the work we do – and we need to change that. So we’ve started changing the terminology to TFR: technology facilitated resolutions. And now more people understand what we can offer them.

Modria now handles resolutions for Gwinnett County in Georgia. Colin shows the landing page which constituents see when they login to appeal their taxes, their tickets, and so forth. It’s branded just the same as the Gwinnett County pages, plugs into the data and databases that Gwinnett uses, and makes the whole process much easier.

(ed note: looking at both the constituent and county employee sides of Modria, I’m reminded of CRM tools like Salesforce, Desk.com, and TenderApp, in terms of how the dialogue seems to be mapped out)

Nobody in the last 25 years has conceptualized tax assessments as an ODR process, Colin says. Not even the county workers, who see them as appeals, not disputes. Yet this is almost exactly the same sort of system we saw in eBay and Paypal, except it’s not e-Commerce, it’s an adjudication of civic rights. We’re blurring the line between dispute resolution and workflow management. We need to think about the whole end-to-end life cycle about these, from the perspective of both the cases which themselves are part of a broader river as experienced by the case managers. We can continue to use all the ADR lingo on our side, but we need to embrace the ways that our customers think about what we are trying to sell them.

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Marie-Claude Asselin is the CEO of the Sports Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada. When a Canadian athlete is accused of a doping violation we are in charge of the process to determine whether and how they should be held accountible, but we also deal with disputes such as athletes not being selected for national teams, as well as funding questions. SDRCC deals with a lot of Type A personalities, and so zero-sum is a big issue here, but it does get 80% of them to settle through mediation, and they are very proud of that.

Their challenges include time-sensitive proceedings for traveling athletes with competition deadlines; geographic / linguistic duality in Canada; and (frankly) a staff which is unused and cool to technology. So they developed a Case Management Portal from scratch to help serve their needs. It’s a secure online tool which allows staff to access information and documents anytime from anywhere. It offers a great deal of secure flexibility for staff dispersed over the country and over the globe.

Marie-Claude logs in to her own account to demo some mock cases through the CMP. It is a good deal less sophisticated than Modria’s, and she jokes that had she seen Colin’s presentation a few years ago, she would have simply given him a call rather than rolling their own. Still, user surveys have shown 86% found it easy to navigate, with many other high indices of comfort and use as well.

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Graham Ross is the Vice President (Europe) of Modria and founder of TheMediationRoom. He argues that the Internet, by extending further into our lives, is also creating new landscapes of disputes that ODR is well-positioned to handle.

Graham brings up some of the lawsuits around TripAdvisor comments. Some may be “fake”, and some may be by competitors, but they may even be fake in interesting ways. These could be conceptualized as a form of dispute, but not only as a form of dispute between the complaintant and the hotel, but rather a dispute against the entire idea of trust in the Internet, which these fake reviews are undermining. Pretty soon the reviews are all so mixed up that it’s no longer clear which reviews can be trusted anymore, except that they are reliably unreliable. Far from being empowered by information, the poor customer can end up in a worst position than they were before the Internet, Ross exclaims!

Ross shares more stories about disputes between sellers and buyers and how they are embedded into larger information architectures, e.g. complaints in review forums being aggregated into Google search results which then drop the disputed merchant in ranking. He mentions the example of a reputable law firm, founded in the 1760s, which seems to have dropped notably in Google search after a disgruntled customer (or savvy adversary) posted lots of negative reviews about the firm across several different review sites (ed: compare my post on Google NegativeSEO). Disputes are not only online, they are increasingly decentralized outside the marketplace, but incorporated inside the nonmarket finding devices used to connect buyers and sellers.

Ross ends his presentation by asking the audience to remember that these cases – which are fundamentally about unregulated reputation – are important for the “integrity of the Internet,” and that we need to develop solutions to help secure and preserve it.