R&D Crossover

I am at the annual conference of ALRA, the Association of Labor Relations Agencies, in Ottawa, Canada – the Association’s members are drawn from Canada and the U.S., and the conference alternates between the two countries.

Last night in the hospitality suite I was engaged in a discussion with a gentleman who has just coauthored a paper on electronic voting in union elections (using the web and telephone electronic voting). I told him about the work that UNCITRAL has embarked upon to create an international B2C dispute resolution program online, and about the work that Chittu and Colin have been doing at eBay/PayPal with community courts. He thought both were interesting, but not related to his interest in online voting. I think he’s wrong.

First, it seems to me that the community court platform has some direct connections to the idea of online voting, but that’s not what I really started thinking about later in the evening. I began to reflect on an observation I have made in the past about the relationship between developments in graphics and animation and the world of offline and online games.

It has always seemed to me that gaming has been the R&D ground for advances in graphics and animation that have spilled over into arenas not contemplated by the developers. The ability to create better animation and graphic effects for online games like WOW has had a spillover effect that has enabled non-game sites like Second Life to exist, and I still have some faith that at some point the improving nature of avatars is going to open up a dispute resolution use for graphic environments that will be significant. Basically, the R&D is done where there is an immediate need, and an immediate payoff in the form of sales or subscriptions that puts money back into the system for more R&D, etc. Everyone benefits in the long run as the new technology becomes cheaper and more readily available – my webcam can let me present myself as me, or as a cartoon character, or as a dinosaur (probably appropriate) and it can use my facial expressions to move my dinosaur’s head, mouth and eyebrows to convey nonverbal messages. That’s “free” with my webcam, and is a result of graphic development in a commercial arena far removed from basic communication.

So, I think my ALRA friend will find that the work being done in B2B and B2C ODR will spill over into his world, perhaps sooner than he thinks, and I think it means that projects and discussions like the ODR and Consumers 2010 conference in Vancouver in November have the potential to impact a far wider audience than the ones that immediately come to mind when one thinks of online commerce.