I originally considered blogging about something other than Model United Nations, maybe write something about American politics or the recent updates in Egypt and Syria. But after experiencing an MUN-related dream (really, nightmare) yesterday night, I felt compelled to journal about it before it is lost in the back of my mind, forever.

A dimly-lit room; an long, oval-shaped, oak table in the middle with chairs surrounding it; a projector and screen at the front of the room; the sound of a gavel banging. I awaken. I am sitting in a chair at the table, along with fifteen or so others. It is like every other Model UN conference that I have been to – we were all in our formal wear, we had placards and nametags with our countries’ names on them – but some things were evidently missing. For one, I did not know what the topic was, and beyond that, I had no clue what my country was, let alone my country’s position. I turned my placard around – it read “Ghana” (I’m not sure why this specific country – I’ve never delegated as Ghana in my life, and I’ve never had any significant connection that I can recall with it).

The moderator calls on me. Apparently I was next on the secondary speaker’s list. As I stood up, words describing my state my mind bombarded my mind – nervous; anxious; petrified; dazed; confused. I opened my mouth to say something – anything – but no words were spoken. I didn’t even have the ability to utter cliché material, stressing the importance of education, of long-term AND short-term goals, of sending in UN peacekeepers, of teaching a man to fish rather than giving him a fish. I sat down in my seat, dismayed. I was criticized for failing to yield my time to the dais, something I remembered to do but found myself physically unable. At the last words of the chair, I woke up. What a nightmare.

I remember feeling that way at the first conference that I attended two years ago. I was representing Estonia in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at one of the larger conferences in the city – Vancouver Model United Nations. I think that this apprehension never completely goes away. The chance of being called out by another diplomat on a certain statement, being called out by the moderator for wrongly representing one’s country – that is scary. But failing to say anything at all, failing to defend your country’s policies and national interests, that is something that cannot be afforded.

So, to all you beginner MUNers out there, or even those of you not involved with Model UN but are shy to speak publicly, remember that the first and largest barrier is the first word or sentence that you say. After that, you’ll find that it all simply gets easier!

- MW 

Yields are possibly one of the least understood, most underused, yet extremely useful parts of the MUN strategy toolkit. More often than not, delegates revert back to the good old “I yield my time to the chair” phrase after addressing a committee from the speaker’s list, often only using a portion of the speaking time allotted. While this may get you a “nice” response from the moderator, this is an unfortunate waste of a yield. Knowing how to strategically use your yields can make a dramatic difference on the effectiveness of your debate.

Yields allow you to “transfer” your remaining speaking time in three different ways: to another delegate, to questions from the committee, and to the chair. Let’s go through each of these in order, explaining how and when they should be used, along with some simple examples.

• Yielding to another delegate. This is a powerful option that lets you transfer your remaining speaking time to another delegate of your choice. If you know there is another delegate who supports your position, yielding gives them a chance to affirm their support and further promote your argument to the committee. Other times an ally with something important to say may be stuck at the bottom of the speaker’s list. Why not yield your time to them, knowing that their statement will help give additional support for your position? This is a bit like a (fair) way to help your friends “skip the line” and speak as though they were at the top of the speaker’s list.

Example: You finish speaking with 45 seconds remaining. Country B has just sent you a note saying that her country would like to add support for your position. Unfortunately, country B is ten spots down the speaker’s list. Yielding to country B would be a quick and effective way to bolster additional support and legitimacy for your position.

Example: Countries A, B, and C are allies positioned second, fourth, and twelfth on the speaker’s list. Each time one of them is allowed to speak, yields can be used to allow the ally with the strongest and most relevant statement to speak, depending on the current subject matter.  This effectively triples the chance that you will have the right thing to say, at the right time.

• Yielding to questions. This is a slightly more risky option, as you may not have control over who gets to ask you a potentially piercing question. However, if you have a well developed and researched argument, don’t be afraid to let other delegates ask you questions: a good answer can greatly enhance your country’s position. This has an additional benefit of helping speed up the pace of debate, allowing your committee to cover more ground in a shorter time.

Example: Your committee has become polarized with two opposition blocs. The previous three speakers have been allies who support your position. It is your turn to speak, but you don’t really have much to add. This is an opportune time to yield your time to questions, giving yourself a chance to respond to questions from the other side.

• Yielding your time to the chair. This is what happens the most often, and really just means your forfeit your remaining time to no use. While the chair will typically give a gracious response, don’t expect it to garner you any brownie points. It’s hard to think of an example when this is the best option; use this only when you know the other options will not be beneficial.

There you have it, a quick run down of how to strategically use your yields. Of course, there are many, many more situations where yields can be useful, but I’ll let you explore those for yourself. Why don’t you challenge yourself not to yield your time to the chair during your next committee session? Happy MUN-ing!

Note: Committee rules and procedures differ from conference to conference. Consult with your conference for specifics on how yields are to be used.

So you’ve decided to take the plunge, and enter the world of Model UN. You’ve gone to the weekly meetings at school, and now you want to go one step further; you want to be a delegate at a conference. 

Chances are if you’re anything like me when I was participating in my first MUN conference (in university), the euphoria lasts for about a few minutes before you suddenly realize that this is really happening, and that ahead of you is a lot of work to do. However, don’t worry, because conference prep does not have to be tedious and boring. In fact, done right, it can be easy and breezy! Here are just some general tips.

1. Start your preparation early, and do it consistently
    This is basically another way of saying “do not procrastinate”, but it is a point worth mentioning. For NMUN, conference preparation started about two months in advance, with weekly meetings (and homework to go along with it!) and increasingly frequent get-togethers as we got closer to the conference.
2. Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
   Prepare a delegate binder with all of your notes printed off and organized however you want (subject, organization from which you got the information, etc.). Spend a few hours early on in your preparation just sifting through sources to determine whether they’re relevant, and then the next few weeks thereafter reading through everything you have. While you should be emphasizing on what the committee you have been assigned to has been doing with regards to the topic, be sure to look at what other UN departments, individual countries, and NGOs have done in this topic as well. Learn as much about the topics as you can, before starting to research what your country has been involved in. 
   
   In addition, make sure you know what regional blocs your country belongs to, so you can more readily make alliances with countries at the beginning of the first committee session.
3. Practice your public speaking
    Even if you have experience with public speaking and debate, the dynamics of a MUN conference will be a bit foreign to you, with specific rules and the third-person pronouns. Meet up with some of the delegates from your school during weekends just to practice speaking to a committee session. Set topics for each other, set a speaking time (I suggest 1 minute), and give everybody a very short time (5 minutes) to prepare their speech. After each person is done speaking, give some advice on ways to improve. These peer activities will greatly improve your speaking skills and how comfortable you are with speaking in front of an audience.
   
   

At the end of the day, your first MUN conference should be a fun experience and make you want to go to another one. Do not be too bogged down by awards, because it will prevent you from really enjoying the conference and making friends when your focus is so narrow.

Happy MUN-ing!

This is an opinion piece (not a mandate) on how to win over the obstinate to your side of an argument. This post simply offers a few ideas to mull over: the importance of providing new information, the overuse of emotional delivery, and the misunderstanding of the role of metaphors in making a strong case for your side of an argument. 

You may find that various fields of study contain ideas that are variations on themes. For social psychology, one of these themes is that people hate being wrong and hate admitting that they’ve been wrong. It’s an inertia to be reckoned with. There’s often some overlap between stubbornness and pride in people who are difficult to sway. Instead of forcing them into a corner and admitting that they’ve been wrong all along, give them an out; provide them with new information that supports your side of the argument so that they can attribute their new decision to the new information.

Something to rethink is how displaying excessive emotion can harm your case. Don’t get me wrong - people who argue passionately can certainly be admirable and persuasive. However, you do yourself a disservice if you aren’t thinking long and hard about how you’re being perceived and how it affects your credibility. Having been a debate tournament judge where topics and sides are assigned and a dais member at Model UN conferences where delegates present opinons as determined by their assigned country’s foreign policy, I sometimes just don’t buy the over-the-top speeches and position papers brimming with emotion. I can spot phonies from a mile away; there’s a distinct difference between those with true conviction and those who are merely acting. The possibly worse perception that can result from overly emotional argument is that, while you enthuse people already on your side, your opponents will decide that you are a crazy person. It’s a fine line between zeal and neuroses, and the trouble with fine lines is their subjectivity. 

Finally, realize that metaphors are not evidence for your case; they might be very helpful in describing and enriching your argument, but they cannot actually serve as solid support for your argument in simulations, real-life negotiations, or moral controversies. You’d essentially be employing that someone should adopt your opinion because it is like something else. How much sense does that make? How large is the leap of faith in logic that is required? When people try to make a metaphor (or simile) achieve what it cannot reach, their opponents may just shut off while their supporters nod in unison with knowing agreement. Used improperly, metaphors can widen the chasm between two sides of an argument. 

This isn’t about definitively using or not using new information, emotion, or metaphors. However, if you use these things well, I do think that your argument can be strengthened. Much of it is in the nuances of how you time the introduction of new information, striking a balance between passionate and psycho, and realizing the power and limitations of metaphors. Doing so could be the difference between a stalemate or winning someone over by manipulation, and winning someone over because you have a sound argument. 

The University MUN circuit has come to a close and as June rolls around, so does the Highschool and Middleschool MUN circuits. However, circling the environment of social media and information is the website called http://bestdelegate.com/

This website has overnight, become a sensation in the MUN world— most notably as the cornerstone for MUN PR. If you want your conference to be known, Best Delegate has become the new way to do it. 

How it works: the host updates its members and subscribers about MUN conferences that are advertised to it. This network slowly grows as members and other conference attendees and secretariat/staff enter into their respective MUN circles. Once the conference is advertised, usually a few pictures and a blurb about the conference is out there for all subscribers to see. 

Now I wonder, because of this new sort of unification and centralization for the majority of MUN conferences around the world: will the UN or organizers of the MUN circuit overall start to create their own form of MUN centralization and claim it as the ‘official’ version or collection of information? 

After all, everything is essentially a business, and if Best Delegate profits off the support of the world’s MUN population, then will there be competition in the nearer future?

At one time or another, you’ve probably had to fill out an online form where you were asked to type in a couple of mumbled and distorted words to prove you weren’t a computer. You probably didn’t think twice about completing the simple task, but what you may not have known is that you were actually contributing to a massive project aimed at preserving valuable books and historical documents. Here’s how it works.

The initial technology was invented in the early 2000s, when software engineers needed a way to tell if a user was a real human being, or if they were just an automated computer program (these bots were posting spam comments on websites, signing up for fake email addresses, and buying up high-demand tickets for sporting events). They needed a simple task that was both easy for humans and difficult for computers to complete. Their now-famous solution was called CAPTCHA, and it involved presenting users with a picture of a skewed and squiggly word to type — simple for humans, yet nearly impossible for computers to figure out.

These CAPTCHAs proved to be highly effective and were quickly adopted by many websites, being used by millions of users each day. This in itself was an impressive accomplishment, effectively acting as an automatic gatekeeper that let humans in but computers out. The team didn’t stop there, though. Several years later, they saw a huge opportunity created by CAPTCHA puzzles: why not put the time spent filling out CAPTCHAs to good use? Moreover, the team realized that the reason why CAPTCHAs were so effective (computers couldn’t easily read distorted text, whereas humans could) was precisely the key to solving an altogether different problem.

Enter the digitization of books. There are millions of fading and deteriorating old books and printed documents that are out of reach to the vast population. Scanning software has been used to digitize and preserve these documents, all the while allowing them to be shared by anyone on the web. While much of this process has been automated by computers, even the most advanced scanners and software come across words they cannot recognize. The CAPTCHA team proposed a simple modification to their program: by adding a second word to the puzzle, they could have users help identify words that scanners failed to read. Working the same way as before, users would enter one word to authenticate that they were human, while the second was actually a word from a document scanners had trouble picking up. They called this reCAPTCHA, and those few seconds users spent filling them out have resulted in the digitization of thousands of books.

I didn’t tell you about reCAPTCHA simply because it is a brilliant idea (though it is), or because I have a passion for books (though I do), or because I’m interested in webdesign (though I am). I wrote this article because it shows the power of connecting ideas. The inventors of  reCAPTCHAs  didn’t really create anything brand-new: CAPTCHA technology already existed, and books were already being digitized through text-recognition software. The brilliance of reCAPTCHA lies in how it identified two seemingly unrelated problems, matching them together in a single solution that harnessed the efforts of millions of (unknowing) problem solvers. 

This is the value of connecting ideas. Some of the greatest ideas aren’t really new ideas at all—many times, they are simply new ways of thinking about things that already exist and looking out for opportunities to create value and meet needs. In a society that seems to be running close to exhausting its supply of physical and natural resources and materials, I believe it’s this exchange of ideas that will continue to create value and drive progress.

The following story is not mine - it belongs to an esteemed speaker and dear friend of mine, Kevin LaNave. I hope that this impacts you as it did does, me, and the conference at which I invited him to speak this past March.

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“This story took place in a summer program that I teach in – and in order to fully appreciate just how challenging it was for the students, you need to understand two things:

First, it took place on a college campus, and the students were from all over the country; in other words, they weren’t even close to home. Second, the culture of the program was very focused on being on time. If a student was more than five minutes late, instructors were told to call the office to report the absence; and if the student couldn’t be found within the next ten minutes, the campus security and the police were contacted. And faculty were never late.

Jacob arrived late to class one day, looking distraught. When students asked what was wrong, he replied, “There’s been a series of terrorist attacks, and 27, 000 people have been killed.” Apparently unable to continue, he left the room.

The students were understandably shaken. Those who had cell-phones began to call home.

Several minutes later, Jesse, who was Jacob’s teaching assistant arrived, also looking shaken. He distributed what appeared to be the first page of an article from the CNN website, describing the attacks and the incredible loss of life. Evidently overcome by the news, he then left the room as well.

Frantic calls on cell-phones continued, and student anxiety escalated.

Then my friend re-entered the room, walked over to the board, and wrote, “Yesterday, 27,000 people died from hunger-related causes. Poverty is violence.”

Turning to the class, he said, “I understand if you feel manipulated; and I’m willing to listen to whatever you sense you need to say.”

Several of them verbally tore into him, sharing about the anxiety and pain the experience had caused them. Then one student said, “While I really am angry about what you did, I’m even more upset by the fact that, when I saw what you wrote on the board, I re-dialed my mom, and said, ‘Don’t worry; it’s just hunger.’””

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What a powerful reminder of the nature of humanity - that we sometimes disconnect ourselves from crises when in fact we are part of the equation. We often blame society for the atrocities that are committed against our fellow neighbours in less economically developed nations, yet we forget that we, in fact, are society. Maybe it’s time to think twice and take some sort of action to contribute to the improvement of the current status quo.

Does that necessarily mean flying to Ottawa to meet with Harper and have legislation passed by tomorrow? No. But can this look like more engagement in bringing about awareness of global concerns? Can this be volunteering a Saturday evening each week to the homeless shelter a few blocks from where you live? Sure. The challenge is there - to accept or not, that’s up to you and me.

- MW