Posted: June 17th, 2015

, from a critical standpoint, advantages and disadvantages of ODR that are spotlighted by its proponents and detractors.

Week 7 Overview and Objectives

Online Dispute Resolution

Overview

Chapter 4 of your Macfarlane text describes the nature of various ODR processes, and offers comparisons between them and their traditional, offline, ADR counterparts. Different types of contexts in which ODR has been applied are discussed, with a view to understanding what types of disputes ODR might best be applied to. The text also discusses the main advantages ODR offers, as well as casting a spotlight on various challenges to its development and application.

On the Readings and Resources page, you’ll find a Power Point entitled ‘ODR – Introduction and Overview’, which complements the Macfarlane text by defining and describing ODR as well as touching on its developmental stages and potentialities.

You will notice (and probably appreciate!) the relative brevity of this week’s reading assignments. Quite a bit of good writing has been published on ODR, and you will be exposed to more of it during your ODR course. This week, instead of reading heavily, I prefer you spend time on the Internet, appreciating the wide world of ODR and getting a sense of what ODR looks like from a consumer/disputant viewpoint. This is the point of our assignment for this week: it takes us on an Internet tour, visiting the sites of ODR service providers offering their expertise in various dispute resolution processes – and reporting on what we’ve found out by comparing them

In our discussion forum this week we will approach, from a critical standpoint, advantages and disadvantages of ODR that are spotlighted by its proponents and detractors.

Objectives

By the end of this week you should be able to:

Appreciate the potential offered by ODR, as well as the challenges it poses to systems designers, disputants and third parties.
Distinguish between a range of ODR processes.
Consider a wide range of contexts in which ODR is applied and practiced.
Compare characteristics of some of the types of technology applied in ODR.

Visit the websites of ODR service providers, and identify one specializing in each of these processes:

Cybertrial (any type of process in which a ‘judge’ or ‘jury’ gives a verdict – regardless of the legal standing of that decision – and the process is described by the service provider as some kind of an online court setting as opposed to arbitration)
Arbitration
Mediation
Negotiation
You can find these sites through www.odr.info (Links to an external site.), the Macfarlane text, search engines or any other means. I strongly suggest conducting searches of your own. At any rate, you must visit these sites personally; don’t rely on summaries or descriptions in the reading material or on websites such as ODR.info. Make sure the sites you choose are currently active! Some of the sites described in the texts and other compilations are now inactive, and many others have changed their nature, the services they provide and their technological platform. I want you to find four service providers who are currently active, and if this means you need to sift through some antiquated jetsam still afloat out there, you will be both applying a more critical lens to what you see, and also get a tour of ODR’s evolution. Witnessing this evolution, including the rise and fall of ODR service providers and the ways in which they attempt to create their own niche in the market through packaging and technology, is part of the purpose of this assignment. Another form of discernment you must apply, is through choosing ODR service providers – and not anything else (internet advertising for mediators, online information or resources on ODR or ADR, etc.). If the site you found is not clearly offering to conduct dispute resolution online, it is unsuitable.

New sites are being added constantly! Every time I give students this assignment, I learn about a new site that had not yet popped up on my screen yet. I’m looking forward to that.

Using this Word version of the chart below, compare the sites you chose according to these differentiating questions. Use the questions below to guide you in filling in the chart. Note: Good answers to the questions posed will generally be 1-3 sentences. While in some cases a 1-2 word answer might be suitable (such as: by answering the question “Additional ODR services offered?” With ‘NONE’), a cryptic answer to other questions, particularly the later questions, may detract from your score as more expansion is required (e.g., for ‘Technology involved’, an answer of ‘Internet technology’ or ‘computer’ will not be considered adequate.) great papers will go beyond this, and include your own reflections on what you found – specific thoughts or critique regarding the sites you chose, or general comments on your tour through ODR.

NOTES:

1) This chart is offered for convenience, not in order to constrain you, and certainly not in order to confound you. It may not work well with your browser or version of Word. Feel free to re-create this chart on your own, or to choose another form of presentation that touches on the topics I ask you to cover. If the template provided does not work well for you, please – do not fight the chart! Even as the course comes to an end, I need you to save your energies for more important things.

2) Given the nature of the assignment, the chart, etc., there are no page limitations for this assignment.

Required textbook.

Macfarlane, J., Manwaring, J., Zweibel, E., Smyth, G., & Pearlstein, A. (2011). Dispute resolution: Readings and case studies (3rd ed.). Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publication
Chapter 4.

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Kindly make sure the writer writing this paper has the required text book. Make sure it’s also proofread by the right person.
See my note to writer.
Kindly forward my power point email to writer.

Writer, Kindly put the correct page numbers to each citation. Make sure you use the textbook itself. Don’t use the online ones because the page number is not the same with the text book. I will be checking the page numbers to make sure it matches what you citied. If it does not match, I will get my money back.
So, if you don’t have the text book required for this paper, please don’t write this paper.
Thank you.

Let writer know to focus on chapter 4 of the text book.
Starts from page 419-460.

Is all about online Dispute Resolution.
So, I expect page numbers to be from this pages. If not, then writer has the wrong book.
Thank you.