Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution

I spent part of last night and a bit of today participating in a conference sponsored by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University – the best I can tell, the conference was entitled, “Exploring Next Generation Governance Models.” I was invited to participate specifically in one of the concurrent sessions, “Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution,” a discussion among tech and dispute resolution professionals about research and opportunities for crowdsourced ODR.

There were some interesting ideas surfaced, beginning with some remarks at dinner last night by Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy CTO in the Obama White House, and previously at Google. The metaphor he used, which I think is a very good one, is that we are in the throes of a change in the nature of governance from an old-fashioned “broadcast” model, where central sources send out information and services through controlled channels, to an Internet model where information is distributed through packet sharing and self-organizing networks. Not to stretch the metaphor too far, the key difference is that in an Internet model, there is a common protocol with development above, and a myriad of uses below, all able to converse because of the common protocol. In a government or social frame, this has some implications for how decisions are made and how policies are developed and implanted. On the physical side, it is why creating a unified first responder system using the old broadcast technology won’t work – the system failed at 9/11 (8 years ago today) and at Katrina, and even a good system using secure channels will fail again in the future. The failure will be for different reasons, but the impact will be the same – much better, the argument goes, to set a protocol and allow multiple apps and multiple uses, all of which can talk to each other. Anyway, I found it a compelling metaphor for Gov 2.0.

As a side note, I think the strong push toward “public input” that is at the heart of e-government, Gov 2.0, or whatever you call it, is interesting. The proponents take it as an article of faith that open public input and crowdsourced policy making is not only good, but democratic in a fundamental way. I think there is a good bit of exaggeration in this attitude, and a good bit of elitism. The people in the room at the Cosmos Club today will certainly be active participants in crowdsourced government. But many citizens will not be active participants (and on my darker days I think they should not be). For a variety of reasons having to do with class and income and other factors, I think crowdsourced policy making will create a political underclass in Gov 2.0 that is as firm and palpable as the political underclass that exists now. Gov 2.0 and crowdsourced policies may level things a bit, but we should wait before we get too excited about how much it will level things.

In the ODR session I made a couple of comments that I’ll pass along here. First, I noted that the participants were defining dispute resolution very narrowly. For one thing, they were defining it as always seeking resolution, which is not the case. Also, they were talking about ODR as based in online commerce (which I don’t think is accurate any more) and as operating independently as a fourth party without the need of a third party. My comments were aimed at redefining ODR as “the intelligent application of technology to any dispute handling process.” That’s not perfect either, but I think it’s better than a more narrow definition, and in the development of systems, definitions absolutely matter.

The other issue I addressed was the tendency to approach crowdsourcing as though the crowd were all on the post-platform development side of the equation. For example, eBay’s new community court is held up as a crowdsourced approach to dispute resolution because it brings in multiple eBay community members to resolve issues. (Peer patent review is also often cited as a crowdsourced activity – and one participant commented that the first crowdsourced dispute resolution was the creation of local juries in England that took the burden of making decisions about local justice away from the monarch.) My argument was the there should be a crowd on the other side of the equation, too – the more input and diversity in the development process (sort of a Linux model), the less any one person or small group’s perspective will dominate the application's functionality. This is, I think, particularly important when there is any multi-cultural dimension to the dispute resolution process – which there almost always is.

I think this will be an ongoing discussion, and I hope to remain engaged.