What is it about December and a lack of interest in mediation and conflict resolution?

(via Google Trends)

I’ll be continuing my discussion of credentialing shortly, but in the meantime, here’s an interesting insertion of mediation into public-sector dispute resolution: North Carolina’s Senate is considering a bill that would include mediation as a step in disputing public records and open meeting law issues. Story here.
Also, Cricket Australia is lobbying the International Cricket Council [...]

We often tout the benefit of mediation reducing litigation, but what about the litigation that mediation creates? Coben and Thompson consider that question in their article, Disputing Irony: A Systemic Look at Litigation about Mediation.
The link goes to the full-text of the article, and as a teaser, here’s the breakdown of mediation issues presented in [...]

I just came across a really nice bit of work by Jennifer Shack at the Resolution Systems Institute:
Bibliographic Summary of Cost, Pace, and Satisfaction Studies of Court-Related Mediation Programs.

Here’s an interesting perspective on mediation’s exposure on the web, Google Trend’s history of “mediation” (1) popularity as a search term and (2) occurrences in online news articles.

Unfortunately, it also seems like there’s a lot more interest in and coverage of war than peace…

Yesterday I received another reminder announcement from ACR about the upcoming annual conference in Phoenix. That’s not a bad thing per-say, but it did have me worried, since amidst all the conference publicity, I’ve yet to hear anything back from my session proposals for the conference.
In academia, knowing whether or not you’ve [...]

A conflict management-related job posting that just came out…
Associate Director, Center for Student Conduct and Conflict Management Services
Sponsor: Rochester Institute of Technology
General Summary:
To serve as the Associate Director, Center for Student Conduct and Conflict Management Services, with primary responsibility for the coordination and development of RIT’s Mediation Service and Restorative Conferencing program. Additional responsibilities [...]

One of the first things new students in conflict resolution learn is that it’s helpful to not jumble together and conflate the terms conflict resolution, mediation, and alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Toward that, i usually end up scrawling out some iteration of this on the whiteboard:

Conflict resolution includes a rich variety of practices, process [...]

It seems like short notice, but I just received this job announcement:
Community Mediation Maryland AmeriCorps Coordinator
Full-time Contractual Position
(This is a grant funded position, with funds remaining for 8 months, with good possibility of renewal.)
Job Duties:
v Recruit and hire AmeriCorps members for sites throughout Maryland
v Coordinate training for AmeriCorps members
v [...]