About CRInfo: The Conflict Resolution Information Source

CRInfo was created in the late 1990s, when the Conflict Resolution Program's Project Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Steve Tobin, called Guy and Heidi Burgess and asked if we would be interested in creating a comprehensive conflict resolution website.  The Hewlett Foundation was already giving CIC (then called the Conflict Resolution Consortium) a core support grant, and Tobin knew of our interest in using the Internet for conflict resolution education.  

He told us that he had been getting "lots of proposals for little websites,"  but instead of funding lots of little, disparate website, he thought it would be better to create one, large, comprehensive website.  He gave us the names of the people who had sent him the "little proposals," and working with all of them--and others with similar expertise and interests--we created CRInfo in 1998.  

Our initial goal with CRInfo was to create a "one-stop information shop" for conflict resolution books and articles, similar to the scholarly archives that index articles in more traditional disciplines.  At the time it was created, we really believed (and we might have been close to right) that it contained links to all of the existing online information on conflict resolution, as well as information about journal articles and recent conflict resolution books--in one place. (It had a separate listing for "online resources" and "print resources."  Maintaining such a comprehensive listing -- especially of web resources quickly became impossible. But we spent many years, when we had Hewlett funding, scouring the web in search of the best conflict resolution information, and keeping a large list of annotated links to those resources.

After Hewlett ended its conflict resolution program, CRInfo has continued, but in a much less work-intensive (hence less money-requiring) form.  We rely now on Google's help to identify online resources on a large variety of conflict topics.  We also have largely integrated CRInfo into Beyond Intractability and vice versa.  That means that all the materials produced for BI--many of which cover or are relevant to small scale, tractable conflicts as well as large scale intractable conflict--are available on the CRInfo site as well.  (This includes, for instance, many articles on the causes and dynamics of conflict, conflict negotiation, facilitation, mediation, arbitration, conflict communication, etc.) Similarly, all the CRInfo "Core Knowledge Essays" are available on BI as well as CRInfo.  These two sites, together, receive between 200-250,000 unique users/month.