CYBERWEEK: Online Mediation Experience Have you done it?

With Cyberweek over I was happy about participating in the online mediation at The Mediation Room playing the role of Mediator. Thank you Graham Ross, the creator of The Mediation Room and to the two colleagues playing the parties and all the other visitors who left comments and suggestions.

Although I have been involved in conflict resolution since 1986 and have been a mediator since 2000 this was for me a new media for mediating.

I finished believing it seems promising as:

- It can provide mediation for small claims (as was the case) where having everyone in a room will mean additional costs;

- It may well be an acceptable way for consumer complaints if the large manufacturers and distributors of consumer goods will sign in committing to answering complaints (E-bay has done for a number of years)

- How would it work for larger more complex cases? Any experience out there?

although I met with some difficulties:

- What does the mediator do when the parties do not respond?

- Since caucus was not successful (the parties just did not respond to the earlier requests to meet in private rooms) was it a good move to have all the discussion in the public room?

- During the simulation I was under the impression that the parties did not read some of the postings. How do you deal with that?

- It did seem more useful for rights based discussion than interest based. Was this a correct perception?

On the technical aspects:

- It took my system several minutes to open each interface although I have a high speed connection. Is that common?

- The time difference seemed to impact the flow of communication (a nine hour difference). We were all responding with large gaps between messages. How did that impact the mediation process?

Would enjoy having other people’s comments.

Enjoyed being part of this experiment,

Best regards,

J. Arthur Vasconcelos

vasconcelos@alum.mit.edu

0 members like this

Comment by Nathan Law on November 2, 2010 at 2:42am: Arthur:
In my recent capacity as a law student, I had some exposure to The Mediation Room and other online dispute resolution processes. You bring up lots of good questions, and I don't pretend to have answers. So I'll just focus on the two biggest, most practical barriers (as I see them anyway) to the widespread use of online dispute resolution (ODR) platforms.
The first is the parties' comfort level with an online interface that is new to them. Will they have the patience to learn it? If so, then will they be able to trust that it is secure?
The second is the mediator's ability to manage the process. The difficulties you talk about in your post go directly to this point. I thought it was interesting how you saw ODR as more useful for rights-based negotiation than interest-based. I think I would agree, though I don't have the experience to back it up.
Enjoyed your post. - Nate

Comment by J. Arthur Vasconcelos on November 2, 2010 at 7:10am: Thanks Nathan. I enjoyed your thoughful comments. Would online ADR be useful for instance as a step between Complaint > Legal Action in large Insurance, Utility and other consumer oriented businesses? Then would it had value to the process? We would have Complaint>ADR>Legal Action. Havind a third party do it from outside the business would add to its credibility. Wouldn't it?
Best from J. Arthur

Comment by Nathan Law on November 2, 2010 at 12:15pm: J. Arthur:
Much appreciate the response. Yes, I think it has potential as a buffer between complaint and legal action. I think online ADR would be most useful if it were closely connected to the first step, the complaint. If the complaint triggered an online dispute resolution procedure then the disputants could begin communicating immediately and not waste any time. It would also make disputants less likely to jump to the 'legal action' stage too quickly. I think you're probably right about the outside third party mediating would add credibility and neutrality. So, perhaps that's where The Mediation Room platform comes in.
- Nate

Comment by Noam Ebner on November 3, 2010 at 6:17am: Hi Arthur - I'm so glad you've brought this experience, which we were all able to observe, into the Hub for discussion!

I've also had cases where parties didn't 'show up' for asynchronous meetings in private areas, even though they didn't come straight-out and say "I don't want to" or "that's not a good idea".

[I've always seen this as similar to the email phenomenon of your counterpart answering a part of your email - but not addressing one issue or question you raised. This leaves you with only questions: Are they avoiding it on purpose? Trying to mess with you? Did they just not see it?]

I've never had a similar experience happen to me, by the way, in online mediation conducted by email. When I send a private mail to someone, they invariably answer me with a private letter, not avoiding the private 'session.'

Anybody else have this caucus-avoidance happen to them in online, platform-based, mediation?