In this episode Colin interviews Brad Porteus, founder of BridgeGrades.org, a report card for Congress that grades politicians on how collaboratively or divisively they govern by compiling objective 3rd-party data. Bridge Grades offers citizen voters an alternative lens to evaluate and assess the performance of our United States legislators beyond ideology or party affiliation. Brad was motivated to create BridgeGrades.org because he believes toxic polarization and hyper-partisanship is holding us back. His multi-year quest is to build Bridge Grades into a transparent, open source, crowdsourced, and independently governed system protected from special interests. Durable and self-sustaining, Bridge Grades aspires to be a public utility that offers citizen voters an easy way to sort Congressional bridgers from dividers, creating incentives that can lead toward more collaborative governance for our common interests.

Learn more about BridgeGrades.org

Learn more about Brad

In this episode we speak with Julie M. Walker, an experienced arbitrator and mediator from Denver, Colorado, about a recent scam attempt she experienced and thwarted. We discuss how to recognize such scams, the best steps to take in response, and the growing prevalence of such schemes.

Learn more about Julie here: https://irelandstapleton.com/people/julie-m-walker/

In this episode, Colin Rule interviews Nelson Timken, founder of http://www.resolveourdispute.com, about mediating court referred cases and the specific challenges involved with handling litigated cases. This conversation builds on many of the points Nelson made in his mediate.com article Mastering Mediation Advocacy: Essential Skills for the Modern Litigator, co-authored with John Siffert.

About Nelson:

Nelson is an experienced neutral whose ADR practice is driven by a deep commitment to fair process, empowering parties, fostering understanding, and achieving results by perseverance. He values impartiality, integrity, and professionalism above financial gain. His approach to dispute resolution is to continue to work on a case until the parties are satisfied that every avenue of resolution has been explored. He has over 30 years of experience resolving cases in litigation, specialized industry knowledge, a high success rate, innovative approaches to problem-solving, and a commitment to client education. He offers a client-centric approach where self-determination is king.

Nelson's website is at https://www.timkendisputeresolution.com/ and https://www.resolveourdispute.com/

His mediate.com profile page (with a list of his articles) is at https://mediate.com/mediator-profile/Nelson-Edward-Timken/