Peacemaking in the Digital Age
August 21, 2026 – Gould Center for Conflict Resolution
559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, CA 94305

8:00 a.m. Check-in and Light Breakfast leading to 8:30 a.m. Opening Activity

• Conversation + Connection –

Connecting Activity led by Malka Kopell, CEO Civity, a national nonprofit dedicated to bridging across difference and building common ground for community problem-solving.

9:00 a.m. Land Acknowledgment and Blessing for the Day

• Charlene Eigen-Vasquez – Ohlone tribal leader and legal team member of Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

In addition, has deep interest in land back movement with farming as a modality. Her first ceremonial reburial was at Stanford.

9:15 a.m. Welcome and Introductions – Greg Mann – CCRU Team at CRD

• Grande Lum, Director – Gould Center for Conflict Resolution: (including a brief discussion of open rebellion against AI)

Grande Lum is the Director and Senior Lecturer of Law at Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution. He is an author, practitioner, and researcher who has contributed to the development of the field of community conflict resolution and mediation.

• Kevin Kish, Director – CA Civil Rights Dept. (video)

Kevin Kish is the Director of the California Civil Rights Department (CRD), which protects residents from unlawful discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and housing as well as from hate violence and human trafficking.

• Chhaya Malik for CCRU – Deputy Director Dispute Resolution Division

Chhaya Malik is DRD Deputy Director and leads a team of attorney mediators working to resolve civil rights complaints filed with CRD. The DRD includes CCRU, which assists local communities experiencing fear, conflict, or tensions relating to discriminatory practices, hate incidents, or hate crimes that have a community impact.

• 9:30 a.m. Shared Agreements for today’s program – Greg Mann

• 9:45 a.m. LCFI Panel Justice Robert Yazzie, Rainey Enjady, and Charlene Eigen-Vasquez, Cheryl Fairbanks – How AI saved our people from extinction (Ancestral Intelligence).

10:30 a.m. Return to Plenary Ted Talks:

• Sarah Roberts – UCLA – AI AND Civil Society/Civil Rights, Artificial Intelligence and bias emerging across all relations, including in connection with jobs, housing, healthcare, and access to justice. (by video)

• Margaret Hagan, Executive Director of Legal Design Lab and Stanford SOL, how tech can help preserve humanity, civil society and the capacity for empathy through system design.

• Kia Sims, Chief Operating Officer/AISHA: The inspiration that gave rise to the creation of an AI chat bot that provides a rich cultural, social, political context for that is inclusive of the experience and contributions of Black people.

11:30 a.m. Break

11:45 a.m. Plenary II Ted talks on:

• Colin Rule, CEO and President of ODR: Reflections on how AI and online dispute resolution can and will change the practice of mediation and future design technology designs for community dispute resolution systems.

• Divided Communities Project Executive Director Bill Froehlich and Advisory Council member Ron Wakabayashi will discuss the changing landscape based on advances in technology and telecommunications in the field of community conflict and mediation service providers. Open space resource library will be shared.

• Oladeji Tiamiyu, Assistant Professor and University of Denver, Sturm College of Law and Visiting Professor at Harvard School of Law: Dialogue in service of reconciliation and peace involve narratives and with technology, the opportunity has expanded to be inclusive of art as part of the story to be shared to deepen understanding, empathy, and chances for reconciliation.

12:45 p.m. Luncheon and Fireside Chat

• “Fireside Chat” moderated by Chhaya Malik

An inter-generational conversation about legacy media and digital media: “What is sweet, what is sour, and what is bitter?” – Journalists Erin Aubry Kaplan who has covered race, civil rights in national news outlets and Khari Johnson, AI/Tech journalist with CalMatters and recipient of numerous awards related to digital media.

1:30 p.m. Break

2:00 p.m. Breakout Sessions and Processing Opportunities

Description of Breakout session topic and presenters.

4:00 p.m. Closing Reflections by Dr. Stefano Santo Sabato

Dr. Stefano Santo Sabato – Futurist and entrepreneur will discuss his work both in the private sector and in the teaching profession as a software engineer interested in ethics and AI, building human-centered tools to for the preservation of a healthy and flourishing future. His remarks will capture the essence of embracing the unknown as part of what we must recognize as the essence of what is taking place now – as individuals and organizations dedicated to peace.

4:30 p.m. Building Our Community Conflict Practitioner Network

Please engage with each other, exchange contact information, network and come over to meet the CCRU team!

CONNECTING ACTIVITY

Malka Ranjana Kopell is Co-Founder and CEO of Civity, a national organization building relationships of respect and empathy across divides of race, class, culture and politics. She has over 30 years’ experience facilitating public policy conflict resolution and community engagement processes. Malka served as a program officer for the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, was the founding managing director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University, and is a senior mediator/facilitator with the Center for Continuing Education at California State University, Sacramento. She holds an M.P.P. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Stanford University.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND BLESSING

Charlene Eigen-Vasquez, J.D. (Chair, Confederation of Ohlone People) is dedicated to land back, and rematriation because it directly impacts the physical and mental health of community members. She and her ancestors were born and raised in Santa Clara County. She has witnessed the transformation of the Bay Area from fruit orchards to what is now labeled Silicon Valley. She has a special commitment to decolonizing how we relate to land, plants, animals and “all of our relations.” For nearly 30 years she has focused on protecting sacred sites during the peak of urban sprawl, cultural preservation, and environmental justice through direct action, teaching at the university level and leading education on tribes without federal recognition. Through this work she feels it is critical to decolonize the way we relate to place and all living beings. Her tribe’s motto is “Heal the Land, Heal the People.” Today Charlene is a legal team member for the Wikimedia Foundation. She is also the CEO of Four Directions Consulting, currently under contract by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Conscious Food System Alliance (a Sub-Committee of the United Nations) among other clients, to provide Indigenous Engagement consultation in an effort to integrate Indigenous knowledge as a center piece for future planning.

LIFE COMES FROM IT PRESENTERS – OPENING PRESENTATION

• The Honorable Robert Yazzie served as the Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation from 1992 through 2003. He practiced law in the Navajo Nation for 16 years and was a district judge for eight years. He is now teaching Navajo Law at the Navajo Technical University. He was the Director of the Diné Policy Institute of Diné College (Navajo Nation), developing policy using authentic Navajo thinking. He is the author of articles and book chapters on many subjects, including Navajo peacemaking, traditional Indian law, and international human rights law. He is a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, an adjunct professor of the Department of Criminal Justice of Northern Arizona University and a visiting member of the faculty of the National Judicial College. He recently taught Navajo law at the Crownpoint Institute of Technology. Chief Justice Yazzie continues a career devoted to education in formal participation in faculties, lectures and discussions of traditional indigenous law at various venues
  throughout the world. He has a global audience, and he has frequently visited foreign lands to share his wisdom about traditional indigenous justice and governance.
• Cheryl Demmert Fairbanks, Esq. works in the area of Indian law as an attorney and tribal court of appeals justice. Currently she is the Interim Executive Director of the UNM Native American Budget and Policy Institute. She recently was in Oregon serving as the Walter R. Echo-Hawk Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Lewis and Clark; she also was a visiting Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico’s Southwest Indian Law Clinic. Formerly a Partner at Cuddy McCarthy LLP, she had a general practice in Indian law, including tribal-state relations, personnel, tribal courts, peacemaking and family conferencing, mediation, family, school, education, and indigenous law. As a partner with the law firm of Roth, VanAmberg, Rogers, Ortiz, Fairbanks & Yepa, LLP, she specialized in Indian law. She also worked as senior policy analyst with the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs in the area of state-tribal relations. There, she was instrumental in establishing the Indian Child Welfare Desk, New Mexico Office of Indian Tourism, the University of New Mexico Indian Law Clinic, and the passage of the New Mexico Indian Arts and Crafts Act. Ms. Fairbanks is Tlingit-Tsimshian and was born in Ketchikan, Alaska. She obtained her BA from Fort Lewis College in 1969 and her JD in 1987 from the University of New Mexico. Prior to her law career, she served as a teacher for the Albuquerque Public Schools, Zia Day School, and Administrator for Acomita Day School and the Albuquerque/Santa Fe Indian Schools.
• Rainey Enjady, MBA (Mescalero Apache Tribe) is currently a consultant for Life Comes From It, a grantmaking organization focused on Indigenous Peacemaking, Restorative Justice, Transformative Justice and Land-based Projects. She most recently led efforts to bring Indigenous peacemaking to her community, the Mescalero Apache tribe, by first assessing the interest of tribal council and tribal court leaders in exploring Indigenous peacemaking as an option to settle disputes. In addition, Rainey has collaborated with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Indigenous peacemaking court and other peacemakers, to provide introductory peacemaking trainings to tribes to potentially expand the options that these courts draw from in their work. Previously, she worked for the University of New Mexico‘s Native American Budget & Policy Institute. Rainey has earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Grand Canyon University.

MORNING PLENARY SPEAKERS – Part I

• Margaret Hagan is the Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab and a lecturer at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Institute of Design (the d.school). Margaret researches, designs, and develops new ways to make the US civil justice system work better for people. This includes exploring new AI tools, forms and paper notices, websites, in-person services, courthouse design, regulation and policies, and coalition-building. She teaches project-based Policy Lab and Design School classes, with interdisciplinary student groups working in partnership with legal aid groups, courts, local governments, and nonprofits. In these classes, students learn how to lead innovation in the legal system, through user research, multi-stakeholder workshops, data analysis, and the creative design of new legal product, services, and policies.
• Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D. is a professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.
• Kia Sims, Chief Operating Officer at Aisha AI, leading the operations, strategy, and people behind a technology company built on integrity and community power. She brings nearly a decade of experience in organizational management, civic leadership, and national campaign work, channeling that expertise into building digital futures where Black communities thrive. AISHA is the first AI chat assistant to center Black sources, history, and perspectives as foundational principles – producing better context and better answers for everyone who uses the tool. Developed under the umbrella of Onyx Impact, a nonprofit dedicated to building healthier, safer, and more just digital spaces for Black communities, Aisha prioritizes user privacy, reduces bias and harm, and sources answers from vetted Black news outlets and high-quality publications. Aisha builds retention through cultural alignment – a powerful alternative to the engagement-driven, surface-level responses that define mainstream AI.

MORNING PLENARY SPEAKERS – PART II

• Colin Rule is CEO of Mediate.com and ODR.com, which became for-profit subsidiaries of the American Arbitration Association/International Centre for Dispute Resolution in June 2024. In 2011, Colin co-founded Modria.com, an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) provider based in Silicon Valley, which was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2017. From 2017 to 2020, Colin served as Vice President of ODR at Tyler. From 2003 to 2011, Colin was Director of ODR for eBay and PayPal. Colin co-founded Online Resolution, one of the first ODR providers, in 1999 and served as its CEO and President. Colin is the author of Online Dispute Resolution for Business (2002) and co-author of The New Handshake: ODR and the Future of Consumer Protection (2017). He has lectured and taught at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Law, Pepperdine, Texas A&M, Southern Methodist University, UMass-Amherst, and Santa Clara University. Colin received two awards from the from the American Bar Association: the D’Alemberte Raven Award in 2023 and the Frank Sander Award in 2019, as well as the Mary Parker Follett Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution in 2013. Colin worked with the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, DC and the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge, MA, and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Eritrea from 1995-1997.
• William “Bill” Froehlich is the current Langdon Fellow in Dispute Resolution and Director of the Divided Community Project at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. Professor Froehlich regularly teaches Moritz’s longstanding mediation clinic where he trains students to mediate and supervises student mediators in several Columbus-area venues; he has also taught courses which focus on dispute systems design. He regularly trains mediators for the Supreme Court of Ohio and taught a mediation course at Pepperdine University. In addition to recent invitations to present scholarship at Stanford and Yale, Professor Froehlich was awarded the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution’s 2020 Outstanding Professional Article award for his article (co-authored with Nancy Rogers and Joseph Stulberg), “Sharing Dispute Resolution Practices with Leaders of a Divided Community or Campus.” Through his work with the Divided Community Project, Professor Froehlich regularly delivers presentations to community, elected, and police leaders, and has trained cohorts of community leaders from more than a dozen campuses, dozens of communities, and five state attorney general offices.
• Ron Wakabayashi serves on the Advisory Council at the Divided Community Project at the Ohio State University Mortiz College of Law. He retired from serving as the Regional Director of the Western Regional Office, Department of Justice Community Relations Service, which served the states of Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada and the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Wakabayashi also headed the Japanese American Citizen League national organization during the period in which the campaign for redress successfully concluded in obtaining relief for those of Japanese ancestry who were interned during World War II.
• Oladeji M. Tiamiyu (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law. Before joining DU, he was a Clinician at Harvard’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School and an Expert Advisor at Harvard’s Innovation Lab. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Professor Tiamiyu has been a member of teaching teams for Harvard Law School’s Negotiation Workshop, an executive-level program at the Harvard Negotiation Institute, and with the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Previously, Professor Tiamiyu worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Constitutional Review Commission in The Gambia. His research interests include exploring reconciliation initiatives in the aftermath of national crisis and the intersection of technology and dispute resolution. His research has been published with the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution and Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.

LUNCHEON PRESENTATION ON MEDIA

• Erin Aubry Kaplan is an American journalist, essayist, author, and educator known for her incisive coverage of African American political, cultural, and economic issues since 1992. Based in Los Angeles, she was the first Black weekly op-ed columnist in Los Angeles Times history and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. Her books include Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line and I Heart Obama. A PEN Literary Journalism Award winner, she teaches at Antioch University in Los Angeles.
• Khari Johnson is part of the technology team and is CalMatters’ first tech reporter. He has covered artificial intelligence since 2016. Khari previously worked at WIRED, VentureBeat, and Imperial Beach Patch. Johnson has written and spoken about the harm that AI can bring and has appeared on NPR, The Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC, onstage at WIRED’s 30th anniversary, and at the Democracy Summit at Howard University. He is currently a practitioner fellow at the Karsh Institute’s Digital Technology and Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia, guest speaker at the Pulitzer Center, and sits on the Society of Professional Journalists Board of Directors.

AFTERNOON BREAKOUT SESSION FACILITATORS

• Todd Erickson is a civic engagement and deliberative process designer with more than 30 years of experience helping communities, governments, and organizations have more inclusive, productive, and impactful conversations. As co-founder of Community Dialogue Partners and principal of Collaboration Arts, Todd has supported thousands of collaborative meetings and large-scale public engagement processes, including multi-session racial equity summits that informed mayoral task forces, citizen assembly processes that produced broadly supported policy recommendations, and community listening sessions for state agencies. He is a co-creator of the 21st Century Town Hall Meeting model developed at AmericaSpeaks, and the originator of the Theme Teams / Rapid Sense-Making methodology, a human-in-the-loop approach to real-time community synthesis that is now being advanced with AI assistance. Todd’s work is grounded in the belief that when diverse communities are given the right conditions for genuine dialogue, they consistently find more common ground than they expected. communitydialoguepartners.com | collaborationarts.coM
• Bernardo M. Ferdman, PhD, is an organizational psychologist specializing in inclusive leadership, intercultural and intergroup relations, and participatory dialogue. He is principal of Ferdman Consulting and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Alliant University. For more than 40 years, he has worked with organizations, communities, and governments to design and facilitate processes in which diverse perspectives and people are genuinely heard and incorporated into collective understanding and action. As an AmericaSpeaks associate, he served as lead co-facilitator for CaliforniaSpeaks, a landmark statewide conversation on health care reform involving thousands of Californians, and contributed to other large-scale public engagement efforts. A co-founding partner of Community Dialogue Partners, Bernardo brings scholarly rigor and extensive practical experience to helping groups navigate differences, make sense of complexity, identify shared priorities, and move toward collective action. He approaches inclusion not only as a value, but as a practice that expands what people can understand and accomplish together, with the conviction that when people experience being truly heard across difference, something fundamentally shifts in what becomes possible. ferdmanconsulting.com | communitydialoguepartners.com
• Khuram Zaman serves as the Founding Director of MPAC’s Center for Security, Technology & Policy (CSTP), a unit established to collect and analyze data on threats targeting American Muslims, monitor security risks, and provide timely insights to policymakers and community leaders archive.mpac.org. In his role, Zaman has addressed issues such as the rise in anti-Muslim hate in the U.S. and abroad, calling for stronger federal responses and better protections for religious minority communities.
• Adnan Jaber is a curious, hopeful human from Jerusalem, now living in Los Angeles, and is on a mission to bring people together through tech, AI, dialogue, and entrepreneurship. He is a lecturer at UCLA, where he teaches “Design Entrepreneurship for Peace and Impact,” empowering students to harness technology for social good. He has been part of the executive board at Tech2Peace for six years, contributing to the collaborative team efforts that transformed the organization from its early stages with very limited funding into a multimillion-dollar initiative that fosters tech and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. Adnan founded the PeaceTech Affinity Group with ALLMEP, uniting 20 CEOs focused on peacebuilding by engaging Palestinians and Israelis through tech education, entrepreneurship, job placement, and dialogue within a shared high-tech ecosystem. Adnan is currently a Member at OpenAI Forum, and Member at Council on Tech and Social Cohesion.
• Sandra Rodriguez and Amore Alvarenga work with the Ahimsa Collective which strives to support healing, build safety, and challenge punitive practices. We work directly in our locality and support justice-based movements through training and technical assistance, opportunities to convene, and grantmaking to organizations doing similar work nationwide.
• Sandra Rodriguez has over a decade of experience in restorative justice that includes work in process facilitation, community organizing, training/technical assistance and program development. At the core of all her work is the desire for BIPOC communities to dismantle systems of oppression and to build life-giving ways of being.
• Amore Alvarenga is a restorative justice facilitator and healing justice practitioner who curates healing spaces including workshops, circles, and retreats centered on ancestral practices, nervous system engagement, and healthy relationship skills. Amore centers love, interconnection, and consent in all of their offerings.

CLOSING REFLECTION – OUR FUTURE

Stefano Santo Sabato, Ph.D. – Founder and CEO, Fyberloom and Visiting Researcher, Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis — CESTA
Stefano Santo Sabato is an entrepreneur, researcher, and technologist with more than 25 years of experience developing artificial intelligence and knowledge-management systems in the United States and Europe. He is the founder and CEO of Fyberloom, a company building decentralized, privacy-first infrastructure for the curation, preservation, and responsible use of organizational and community knowledge. He is also a Visiting Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, where his work explores how information is decontextualized and recontextualized by artificial intelligence. Earlier in his career, he founded MediaSoft in Italy and led more than 100 technology and AI projects. His current work focuses on how technology can preserve context, institutional memory, and different perspectives, supporting more informed dialogue, mutual understanding, and collaborative decision-making.
Fyberloom
Fyberloom Documentation and LiveMap Journal