HUSMUN

HUSMUN was a three-day MUN conference that was hosted by my school and I was the CEO of the entire project. It was a lot more difficult and challenging than I expected it to be, but it had its upsides.

Before we dive into everything that happened, you can take a look at the HUSMUN website here and my school’s website here. MUNs need a fair amount of background knowledge to understand fully and I’ll only be going into the organising aspect of HUSMUN as well as what it was like during each of the three days the event was held on. I’ve previously written about MUNs and you can read those articles here: What Harvard MUN Was Really Like and 0014 – MUNs.

Groundwork for HUSMUN

The first mention of HUSMUN that I could find was on July 22nd. During our CAS session, our teacher mentioned that three students had shown interest in making that years edition of HUSMUN – I was one of them. We talked about it very briefly in that Google Meet before picking up a fourth member. As soon as school was over, the four of us met up and discussed the basic details of HUSMUN.

We decided on four committees: DISEC, SOCHUM, UNEP, & UNHRC as well as the tentative dates of October 3rd – 5th (this changed very quickly). Just a few days after the initial discussion, we went back and changed our committees to DISEC, SOCHUM, UNEP, & UNSC as well as decide on who would be doing what. We also planned to have an International Press Corps (IPC) who would act as reporters and the media during the conference. This was around July 28th.

As we had four core members, we had to have four positions. Secretary-General and Director-General were needed, they were the effective CEO and COO of the entire project but we also included Deputy Secretary-General (sort of a right-hand man to the Secretary-General) as well as an Under-Secretary-General (USG), sort of like a high-level manager or the leader of a division in a company. The problem was, the USG role needed to specify what that person would do and we ended up renaming that position to Under-Secretary-General of Administration. The four of us together made up what’s known as The Secretariat of HUSMUN.

As we were hosting this MUN on behalf of our school, we had to get approval from the school’s management. Fortunately, our CAS supervisor for the project was also our school’s Head of Secondary (effectively the vice-principal) and we just had to present our proposal to him to get permission. You can view the proposal here: https://manassadasivuni.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/HUSMUN-Proposal.pdf

HUSMUN Proposal

Most of the proposal is self-explanatory but there are a few aspects of it that I’d like to go more in-depth on. The first one is the External Vice-Chairs (under Proposed Ideas, page 4).

This was quite a big step for our school to take as all previous MUNs hosted by our school – as far as I know – didn’t even allow external delegates to attend, let alone external executive board members. This meant that we’d go from allowing no one outside our school to letting them into the planning process. It’s quite a jump to make when well-reputed local MUNs haven’t done the same. Out of all the parts of the proposal, this was the section that I was most worried about.

The next two sections: Code of Conduct and Slack Guide (page 10) didn’t actually happen. The Code of Conduct section was planned and was to be added to the Delegate Manual but it never went through. I’m not sure why this happened but I’m guessing that the person assigned to it didn’t make it and we never checked in on them. Arguably, that can show that it wasn’t a vital part. After all, no one cared enough to make it or check for it.

The Slack Guide never happened either but that was because we decided at a later date to use WhatsApp group chats rather than making delegates use Slack.

Lastly, we never used Airtable extensively in keeping track of what was being done and we opted to use Google Sheets instead to mark delegates during HUSMUN. I think that the reason we didn’t use Airtable while organising was because most of the workload was put onto the Secretariat or because each Secretariat member was in charge of a particular division. I was in charge of the website, Zoom links and all the techy stuff, someone else was in charge of the writing department and Q&A team, someone else was in charge of design, etc. Because we structured it this way, we didn’t need to have a central database with information about the progress of a task, we could just ask the person in charge of it how it was going.

Getting Things Done

Organising Committee

After we’d got permission from the school, the first thing we did was send out application forms for the Organising Committee which happened on July 31st. We sent the form to our DP Coordinator on July 30th but the delay between our message and the form being sent out wasn’t large enough to cause any worry.

We waited for quite a while to let people sign up for the Organising Committee but since we wanted to waste as little time as possible, I asked one of our classmates to be our graphic designer. This person had quite a large Instagram meme account which they regularly produced content for so I felt like I could trust their work ethic. Unfortunately, this was not the case and all work produced by them took way too long or was of terrible quality. Looking back on it, I should have let this person go after the first two or three missed deadlines but I decided not to and to give them more chances. This was a mistake on my part as it delayed some of the most crucial parts of HUSMUN – the logo and our Instagram post template – which threw us off schedule.

For reference, this person was first added to the team around August 4th but was only formally let go on September 7th. Long before that date, we (the Secretariat) had stopped using this person as our Graphic Designer and had done the design work ourselves, starting roughly around August 17th. We got a different classmate (who actually had a work ethic) to be a replacement soon after. In all honesty, I don’t regret the decision of hiring the original designer as I went off of what information I had, I do regret not letting them go sooner and being more decisive though.

Another thing I learnt from the early stages of the Organising Committee is that you should not expect people to care as much as you do and that you must account for this when creating any kind of timeline. Deadlines were missed more frequently that what I’ve listed below (I don’t have exact dates or a written record of them) and I should’ve added buffer time to each and every deadline I set.

The School

The school was highly involved in HUSMUN which makes sense, after all, this is the first time we’re opening the event to the public. That being said, they were very inconvenient at times. The main example of this was the HUSMUN website. We first mentioned that we would need a website on July 28th in our initial presentation of our proposal. Immediately after that, the Secretariat was occupied with getting the finer details confirmed and the Organising Committee.

The next mention of the website was on August 7th where our Head of Secondary said that he’d instructed the school’s tech team to create a subdomain for HUSMUN. After that, we had a meeting on August 18th to discuss the website with not only the school’s tech team but also the school’s leadership. Personally, I thought this was overkill as it’s as simple as a few clicks and giving us an account but we found out that the school didn’t actually have access to their website. Long story short, our school’s parent company has control over the website and going through them would take a ludicrous amount of time.

To address this, our school decided to buy a separate domain for the HUSMUN website. I was perfectly okay with this, as it’s like asking for a cheap car and getting a Bentley. Yet again, this took a lot longer than I expected to get done. After all, the school is able to purchase a domain and make an account to be accessed by students in the span of a few hours.

After the consecutive delays by the school, we ended up postponing the dates of HUSMUN. Our original dates were October 7th – 9th, but we ended up rescheduling to October 19th – 21st. Regardless, once we got access to the website, I made the first version within a few hours and we were able to meet our revised deadline and that was the last we heard of the school for a bit.

That being said, the school was very helpful throughout the entire conference, even going so far as to run an ad campaign on Facebook for us. Looking back on it, I should have cut them more slack as they had to deal with a lot of red tape yet still managed to get us the resources we needed as soon as they could. Not only that, but this was the event that put HUS on the map and it’s completely understandable that they wanted to make sure that everything was going as well as it could go.

Executive Board

Moving on to the Executive Board, this was a crucial part of the process. You see, no one on the Secretariat had experience chairing a MUN. In all honesty, if our school had a more reputed and established MUN, we would not have been allowed to Chair, let alone lead the event. It was vital that we had experienced Vice-Chairs to help us pull off this event.

Fortunately, we got quite a few experienced applicants, with a third of the applicants had MUN experience in the double digits. Based solely on the data from the application form, we could only eliminate one person (they had only 2 MUNs of experience) and we decided to interview the rest. This led to 4 days (September 8th – 11th) of back-to-back interviews which were chaotic and stressful, to say the least.

Interviews

The interview questions were prepared by one of the writers in the writing department and were split up into 4 sections:

• Introductory
• Experience
• Situation-wise
• General Knowledge

The Introductory section is fairly self-explanatory, with example questions being “Tell us a little bit about yourself”, “What interests you?”, etc. These weren’t the focus of the interview but they did provide some insight into what the interviewee’s general personality and hobbies were. A surprising number of them ran blogs or had a side-project of some kind.

The Experience section is also self-explanatory as it was about their previous times chairing a MUN. Not much to elaborate on there.

The Situation-wise section was the most important as it let us see how they’d react in a scenario that was likely to pop up during HUSMUN and we could see how they would handle the situation in the event that we did hire them. These are a few sample questions:

• What would you do if the same delegates dominate the committee?
• What advice would you give to a first-time delegate?
• If debate starts to get boring, how would you handle it?
• If a delegate is going off-topic, what course of action would you take?

Once we’d finished all our interviews, the Secretariat spent quite a lot of time discussing who to pick. For me, I’d already decided upon one applicant and I was debating who would be the second Vice-Chair. I had narrowed it down to two people and I put my thoughts out to the other three members. In that discussion, they brought up good points against one person, some of which I didn’t even notice during the interview. As far as SOCHUM (my committee) and UNSC were concerned, we had a very easy time picking our Executive Boards.

Unfortunately, DISEC and UNEP had a difficult time choosing but for opposing reasons. DISEC had quite a few experienced applicants and the decision came down to their performance in the interview. On the other hand, UNEP had inexperienced applicants, or at least they were less experienced than the others. For UNEP, one of the applicants was from our school so we already knew this person quite well. Unfortunately for them, we’d seen them before in MUNs and decided not to take them on.

Final Stretch

Preparing Documents

Now that we’d decided who was on the Executive Board (September 12th) and announced them (September 18th), we had to get started on the final preparations for HUSMUN. This was mainly the background guide and the delegate manual. The way we divided the work was that each committee’s Executive Board would be in charge of the respective background guide and the Secretariat would be in charge of the delegate manual. This partly worked.

All the background guides were made without a lot of problems, although two of them cut it very close to the deadline (October 2nd). In addition to that, the other Secretariat members did next to nothing for the delegate manual (with the exception of formatting it) and I was left to write roughly 4000 words 3 or 4 days before the deadline.

I didn’t expect this problem to occur as we’d allotted almost three weeks from when we’d finalise our Vice-Chairs to the final deadline for both documents. We did have weekly meetings every Sunday right from the beginning of the project with the first meeting being on August 16th, soon after we decided the Organising Committee members. I should have checked in on the progress of the background guides and asked the other Secretariat members to do some work for the delegate manual during said meetings.

While all of this was going on, we also had to create a country matrix. This is just a spreadsheet listing out which countries delegates can pick between when signing up and shows which countries were already taken. This was done on September 19th, a day after we announced the full Executive Board for HUSMUN and also the same day we released the signup form.

Allocations

One of the crucial aspects of all MUNs, not just HUSMUN, is the allocations you give out to delegates. This is because some countries are more relevant to the agenda than others and these specific countries should be given to delegates who are more experienced. The whole point of this is to make sure that experienced delegates are able to challenge each other which keeps debate entertaining.

The way we allocated countries is by having one of the Secretariat members do all the work and to give both committee and country allocations. This was a mistake as it meant that more experienced delegates were getting countries that weren’t very relevant to the agenda simply because they picked it as their first preference.

What we should have done was limit the allocation solely to the committee and let the Executive Board of the respective committee decide the country.

October 12th

On this day, I had a meeting with the other Executive Board members of SOCHUM to discuss what crisis we would have. A crisis is an unforeseen scenario that’s meant to liven up debate and show which delegates can think on their feet. During this meeting, while discussing ideas, a person brought up a point about how we didn’t have the right countries to suit our planned crisis best. I explained the way we were handling allocations and I thought that would be it and we’d come up with a different idea.

I was very wrong with that assumption. Throughout the rest of the meeting, that person would continue to make snide, sarcastic and toxic remarks aimed at me despite the fact that I’d said I got their point and would do better. This person implied that I thought I was better than them because I had a higher position on the Executive Board compared to them (Chair vs Vice-Chair) as well as saying that I shouldn’t be in charge of an entire MUN.

While I agree with them, I was inexperienced, I had also told this person that one of the main reasons they were brought on was because they had the experience I needed and that I would require them to help me out. After all, I’ve never done this before and they have. The fact that they threw the exact reason for their part in the team at me felt very below the belt especially since I thought they would actively try to improve HUSMUN. When I asked this person about whether they had a possible solution or for their suggestion in general, they would proceed to say one sentence about a solution before monologuing about how messed up I was for using this method of management.

It’s worth mentioning that they did not explicitly degrade my input but chose to phrase it as “We did it this way at [previous MUN name]. I’ve never seen [my idea] being used, why are you doing this, it’s such a terrible idea”. Their most explicit attack on me was “First of all he doesn’t know anything about marking or moderating w proper ROP [Rules of Procedure] hell do the recognising and noting”.

I can handle comments about how I’m doing things, after all, that’s how you get better but this experience felt like they were attacking me as a person and attempting to undermine my personality and qualities as opposed to my leadership. Essentially, I felt like this person was attacking me and not providing harsh, yet useful criticism.

I avoided confrontation as this was only a week before HUSMUN which wasn’t enough time to get a replacement so I decided to weather it out. After HUSMUN was over, I brought it up with them and they were apologetic. I’m not really satisfied with their apology, but I’m willing to let that go and stop interacting with that person.

To give them due credit, their comments about where HUSMUN was lacking were valid and I did address them in the time between the meeting and the beginning of HUSMUN which did help committee in the end.

The Big Day(s)

HUSMUN Icebreaker Session

HUSMUN was scheduled for October 19th – 21st and we decided to have an icebreaker session a few days before the start of the MUN on October 14th. This isn’t really that interesting as it was just the Executive Board trying to have fun with our delegates by playing skribbl.io. That didn’t really work as the delegates stayed pretty silent throughout the game but it was something.

HUSMUN Opening Ceremony, October 19th

We’d planned out how the Opening Ceremony would play out ahead of time and our Director managed to grab a guest speaker for the event as well. This was how we’d decided to have the ceremony:

• Welcome speech by the Deputy Secretary-General
• Brief remarks by the Director of HUS
• Speech by the guest, Ms Meera Rajagopalan
• Speech by the Secretary-General (me)
• I declare HUSMUN open and everyone leaves

The ceremony went off without a hitch as all the important members of it joined well ahead of time so everyone was prepared when the time came. The most (or least) striking thing about it was the lack of a gavel. For context, all opening ceremonies will end with something along the lines of “I declare [name of MUN] open” followed by slamming a gavel onto a surface. This has oomph behind it but I had to make do with a dramatic pause.

HUSMUN Day 1, October 19th

Day 1 was hectic at the beginning as we’d purchased a Zoom Pro subscription for HUSMUN but it turned out we couldn’t host multiple meetings at the same time with the same account. I’d tested for this before and was able to pull it off but we ran into this error during the conference right after the Opening Ceremony was finished.

Fortunately, Zoom will automatically upgrade the first meeting of a new Zoom account so I instructed each committee to make a new Zoom account and share the link. This worked out quite well given how unprepared we were for this scenario. During our scheduled break between the committee sessions, I talked to the Head of Secondary and we decided to continue to use this method as it was too late to buy licenses for all the committees separately.

Anyway, moving onto what actually happened. I’m not going to go into the specifics of what happened but just a few general points and interesting things that happened. Firstly, the delegates were very active and outspoken which was a good sign.

That being said, the debate did slow down in the second half as they started to run out of topics to talk about. To counteract this, we asked them to read the background guide thoroughly as it would give them more insight into the different sub-topics of the agenda.

Another issue that we kept seeing was that delegates weren’t being representative of their countries and were letting their personal views interfere. This was happening to delegates whose countries are against the LGBTQ+ community. We told them that they had to stick to the views of their country even if it was against their personal ideology.

At this point in the MUN, blocs (groups of allied countries) hadn’t been formed yet and debate was just starting to heat up. Fortunately, we were able to see which delegates were more outspoken than others and adjusted our crisis to involve these delegates.

HUSMUN Day 2, October 20th

Day 2 opened normally, with about half an hour of normal debate before we threw our crisis at them. Here’s what we made:

Update 1

• United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and several other countries governed by Sharia law decide to collaborate and form an alliance and start to build re-education camps in their countries which would follow practices such as gay conversion and electric shock therapy
• Several indigenous Canadian citizens which were reported missing (4000+), most being part of the LGTBQ+ community, were discovered all over Russia, Thailand, India, and Australia as a part of a sex trafficking ring which was most likely to be started by Canadian government officials
• North Korea and the United Kingdom immediately form an allyship, conspiring against these countries at their weakest

Update 2

• Violent protests and riots break out all over the world especially in heavily populated parts of the UAE and Afghanistan. Talks of anarchy are in motion as per our sources. There have been many fatalities
• Canada is in heavy conflict with the riots going on as well as trying to rescue the citizens. The Prime Minister of Canada is assassinated by ANTIFA
• North Korea and the UK are accused of instigating riots and are put under heavy surveillance. World tensions are at an all-time high and humanitarian violations continue to occur

Update 3

• UN officials intervene in the ongoing riots in the UAE and Afghanistan as well as many other countries
• The Japanese yakuza, Russian mafia, and Canadian biker gangs are found responsible for the sex trafficking ring
• An emergency meeting is held by the UN to discuss the humanitarian issues as well as world tensions to prevent another cold war

The delegates were able to deal with this crisis quite well. An added bonus was that some delegates had begun to adhere much more to the views of their country which proved to be vital during the crisis. Quite frankly, I’m surprised they managed to handle all of this in the span of three hours, especially since the updates weren’t given all at once but at random intervals and they had to adapt their stance with each update.

They managed to pass an emergency resolution just before 8pm which was very convenient as that was the scheduled time for our press conference.

Press Conference

Just like the real UN, HUSMUN had a press conference where reporters would ask the delegates tough questions to try and figure out why they were acting in a certain way. The reporter assigned to SOCHUM went on to win the Best Reporter award later on.

The most impressive part of the press conference was that there were meant to be two reporters, but one of them didn’t attend HUSMUN after the first day. This meant that a singular person managed to interrogate our delegates for 50 minutes while being cohesive and making next to no mistakes.

The questions were framed quite well which led to delegates giving vague or contradictory answers. This then led to tougher follow-up questions. The reporter was so good that many delegates gave up and couldn’t answer. Throughout the conference, the reporter only made one mistake which was asking a question to the wrong delegate.

HUSMUN Day 3, October 21st

The final day of committee was nowhere as chaotic as I expected it to be. The delegates had already formed blocs on Day 2 and had discussed what they would have in their resolutions already – they just had to actually write them and then vote upon them.

This took them between half an hour to forty-five minutes but they finished them with plenty of time to spare. The way that the blocs had been formed meant that there were two resolutions. It was effectively a 1v1 between the leading delegates.

We were using a software called muncoordinated which showed the votes of all the delegates on screen. this added quite a lot of tension to the voting as the software would say when a resolution had passed or failed automatically and the number of delegates left to vote was decreasing. In the end, the first resolution failed with 3 delegates to go and the second resolution passed with just one delegate left. The voting was insanely close and I do believe that both resolutions were worthy of passing. In the end, it came down to how good the delegate who formed the bloc was at lobbying delegates onto their side.

For context, we’d scheduled committee to last until 9pm, but the resolution was passed well before our first break at 6:30pm. This meant that we’d effectively ended ahead of schedule and could relax. We decided to play a game of skribbl.io as well as talk with each other while we waited for the closing ceremony’s time slot to arrive.

HUSMUN Closing Ceremony, October 21st

The closing ceremony was a lot more chaotic than the opening ceremony. Unfortunately, DISEC hadn’t passed a resolution and were running overtime. On top of that, they hadn’t filled in the delegate names on our award slideshow which further delayed the starting time. Fortunately, they only delayed the start by 15 minutes.

I was in charge of changing the slides as everyone was speaking, but we hadn’t rehearsed the presentation and Google Slides was acting funny which meant I made quite a few mistakes with the most obvious one was going two slides forward by mistake. In my defence, I clicked the presentation and nothing happened, so I clicked again. Another blunder was having impressively pathetic timing when changing the slides

Once all the awards had been handed out, it was time to make my speech. You’d expect that I would have prepared for this moment. After all, preparations started in July and it was all coming to a climax. Nope. I winged the speech and tried to play off the slideshow fiasco with something along the lines of “Now that the awards have been given out, somewhat smoothly, I’d like to say … “.

You may think that that was the end of the awkwardness but more was yet to come. After I’d ended my speech with the line “I hereby declare HUSMUN 2020 closed” (complete with dramatic pauses), I had no idea what to do next. So I waited for around 30 seconds before saying “I have no idea what to do now, thank you all for attending, I’m going to end the Zoom meeting”. Voila, my awkwardness and a really long project I’d been working on had finally come to an end.

Things I Couldn’t Figure Out How To Mention Smoothly

ConvertKit

To handle the number of delegates who signed up and ensure that they’re getting the information they need, we decided to use ConvertKit to send out mass emails. This saved us quite a lot of time, especially when we needed to send out information on the fly. I was in charge of sending out these emails and while it may seem difficult, it really wasn’t. Not much to say here, but this was still an aspect of my role in HUSMUN.

Chairing

You’d think I’d be able to figure out a way to talk about what I actually did during the HUSMUN committee sessions but nope – it interfered with the flow of the story too much. Anyway, prior to the actual conference, I was very nervous about chairing as it was something I’d never done before. I’d heard it was very easy to do but I was still apprehensive.

To counter this, or at least help, I chaired a smaller MUN that my friends were organising (read about it here) which did give me experience, but I’m not sure how useful that experience was. Since that didn’t help, we had the more experienced members of SOCHUM’s Executive Board start off with moderating while the others marked and operated muncoordinated. This way, I could follow suit and emulate what they were doing.

With this setup, I moderated my first committee session on Day 2 and part of Day 3. It was a lot simpler than I expected, but the main thing that I needed to improve on was being able to get the delegates to motion for various topics or forms of debate (GSL, unmoderated caucus, etc). Another thing that one of the delegates mentioned in a feedback form was that I should ask them questions more often and challenge them more. I’ll have to keep that in mind next time I chair – if at all.

Final Thoughts

I am quite proud of what I’ve made, especially given the number of restrictions I had. that being said, there were definitely areas where I could have improved. The most visible one of these was the social media for HUSMUN. We didn’t post nearly as much as I would have wanted and quite a few post and story ideas fell through.

Anyway, back onto the positive stuff. the event was a surprising success, to the extent that we had around 110 delegates sign up with around 85 – 90 of them showing up to the event. All the feedback I’ve gotten has been positive, with most delegates saying that there was nowhere to improve (or minor improvements like adjusting session timings). Even from the other EB members, everything they’ve said has been positive with the harshest critique being to improve our marketing and branding, an area I already identified.

I think that I’ve had enough of MUNs for quite a while now. I’ll find something else to do and let the younger students take up the mantle for HUSMUN 2021.

HUSMUN Documents

HUSMUN Proposal

HUSMUN SOCHUM Background Guide

HUSMUN Delegate Manual

HUSMUN Timeline

• July 22nd – First discussion about HUSMUN
• July 25th – Discussion about more specific details (committees, roles, etc)
• July 28th – Presented HUSMUN proposal to Head of Secondary
• July 31st – Discussion about the timeline of deadlines and milestones. Organising Committee application forms sent out
• August 2nd – Discussing agendas for each committee
• August 3rd – Confirming agendas
• August 8th – Discussion about the design guide
• August 9th – Finalising Organising Committee members
• August 12th – Design guide deadline (missed)
• August 15th – Logo deadline (missed)
• August 18th – Logo made. Meeting with school tech team about the website
• August 19th – Discussion about HUSMUN website. @husmunofficial Instagram account made
• August 24th – Meeting with the school tech team and school leadership about the website
• August 25th – Website and email handed over. Website homepage made. Design guide finished
• August 27th – Discussion about HUSMUN website, in particular, which pages each member would do
• August 29th – HUSMUN website finished (some pages weren’t published as they were planned to be released later). Secretariat revealed on Instagram account. Vice-Chair application forms released
• September 7th – Vice-Chair application form closed
• September 8th – 11th – Interviewing 12 applicants
• September 12th – Finalising Executive Board members
• September 13th – Introducing new EB members to the HUSMUN Organising Committee and Head of Secondary
• September 16th – Meeting with Director and school leadership team to update them on the progress of HUSMUN
• September 18th – Agendas and Executive Board revealed
• September 19th – Country matrix and delegate sign up form released
• September 22nd – Discussion about the timings of HUSMUN. Discussion with IPC EB to show them how to upload articles
• October 2nd – Background guides and Delegate Manual released
• October 11th – Country allocations sent out to delegates as well as links to committee WhatsApp groups
• October 14th – Icebreaker session with delegates
• October 18th – Position Paper deadline for delegates
• October 19th – 21st – HUSMUN Conference Dates