December 14th to 15th. The two days that I have been anticipating since late March when I took the role as one of the leaders of the planning team of STMUN XI. The end of the conference honestly marked a bittersweet end to so many things–late nights dealing with google sheets, replying emails, drafting speeches, etc. Although a spontaneous act of CAS, this experience has truly been one that I will never forget. While it is impossible to document down all the details, here are some of the examples of how I engaged mainly creatively throughout the entire process.

First off, although NOT a tech person at all, Dennis (DSG) and I tried our best to figure out how are we going to assign delegation to each school. We decided the countries for each committee based on their relevance in regards to the issues we chose for the councils/committees without rotating delegations in the actual UN (GAs, EC, WHO) and based on the actual UN delegation for those with rotating delegations for each term (SC, ECOSOC, and HRC). Although a lot of conferences do not usually do the latter, it was important for us since we wanted to maintain the UN-ness as much as possible. We color-coded each school and highlighted the country we assigned to them with their color. The process was, to be honest, tiring since we needed to match the registration numbers of each school, ensure that there was an equal distribution of bigger/smaller countries among the schools, and check if the school requested for any special committees. 

After that, I used the importrange feature of Google sheets to organize the roster for each committee. This step involved some conventional CAS stages as I did some initial research before deciding to use this feature.

Besides the rosters, I could proudly say that I created an approval panel system for our digital conference this year. For those who do not do MUN, the approval panel is essentially the place where delegates get their resolutions (a document that proposes solutions to the issue at hand) checked and “approved” by an adult advisor. After a resolution has been approved, it can officially be debated. I decided to utilize the Google Form and sheet for approval panel processing. This is a pretty innovative way of doing it. At least for me, I have never seen this in other conferences. I got inspired by the traditional approval panel progress sheet where chairs copy and paste the link of their resolution on a google document, and admins change the status on the column manually. The problem for this system, in my opinion, is that there is a high chance of people editing the same cell and the delayed update of google doc that happens quite often, especially on old laptops. The other inspiration was from a digital conference where I have both chaired at and been a director at before. Therefore, I have been both a user of their approval panel system and a director who helped to vet resolutions at the panel. The resolutions were submitted via an application called airtable, and the navigation page resembles a google sheet. The status of the resolution can be changed with a drop-down list, and chairs cannot edit the cells since they submit resolutions through an airtable form that looks like a google form. However, since airtable is a paid service and had the issue of chairs not informed of when they should send their delegate, I decided to merge the two systems I have used before to create our own approval panel progress sheet. The feedback from both student officers and directors? Not to brag, but there were no issues except for one incorrectly formatted resolution.