I’ve been putting writing this post off for quite a while now because there’s a lot to get through. I’ll try my best to keep this short and sweet, but no promises here…

Origins

COMUN, or Colombo Model United Nations, is Sri Lanka’s largest, and the world’s 4th largest student led MUN conference. My MUN journey began back in 8th grade when I lived in Dhaka, when I travelled to a middle school conference called TASMUN at the Taipei American school in Taiwan. When I moved back to Colombo, I decided to continue with MUN and joined OSC’s COMUN delegation for 2017. At this point, I wasn’t really enjoying being a delegate and was doing MUN more to check a box rather than to actually grow from the experience. I was quite impressed with the scale and quality of the COMUN 2017 conference, but because I didn’t enjoy the delegate experience COMUN was just another one of my after school activities and not really a serious commitment that I was truly passionate about. This all changed in the summer of my Freshman year…

At the end of my freshman year, I was appointed as the Vice President Position of OSC’s Student Government Association for the 2017-2018 academic year. During the summer, I decided to use some of my skills in technology to build a website for the SGA, and one of the first people I sent it looking for feedback was Chayan De Silva. Chayan was a senior at the time, and he was one of the most knowledgeable individuals at school, when it came to technology. Moreover, he was also going to be the Head of Tech for COMUN 2018. I think he was pretty impressed with the website, because he started asking me about web development. He mentioned that he was looking for a way to build a web based points system for COMUN and asked me for some suggestions. At around the same time, I was doing a programming internship at a Telco API service provider called IdeaMart, and was quickly developing my software development skills. When I mentioned this to Chayan, he suggested that I apply for the Deputy Head of Tech position on the Executive Committee (EXCO) of COMUN 2018, and help him out with this points system. Given that I wasn’t too keen on participating as a delegate, but was incredibly passionate about technology, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands and submitted my application early in the 2017-2018 academic year. Turns out there wasn’t much competition for the tech related EXCO positions, so after an interview I was onboard working under Chayan. From early on, it was pretty clear that my primary role would be to develop and maintain the web based points system, whilst helping out with other tech related odd jobs from making PowerPoint Presentations to designing content for our social media platforms. Chayan was doing most of the heavy lifting and I was merely taking a backseat.

However, less than 3 months in, owing to a variety of reasons, Chayan decided to resign from his position and suddenly I was promoted to the Head of Technology position— probably the toughest position in the COMUN EXCO after the secretariat in terms of workload. Being just a sophomore, I was not only one of the younger EXCO members, but also the youngest Head of Tech’s COMUN had ever seen. Initially, having participated in just one COMUN conference, the challenge ahead of me seemed daunting. There are 3 key responsibilities that come under the purview of the Head of Tech— managing the website, developing the points system, and designing all print and digital material. Because I had confidence in my programming and software development skills, I wasn’t too worried about the website or the points system; designing the print and digital material was my main concern. This graphic design aspect ranges from designing placards, to ID cards, to the conference magazine, and a dozen other things that need to be delivered ahead of conference. Having seen the quality of my predecessor, Khalis Khaleel’s work back in 2017, and also without much experience with the Adobe suite, I wasn’t quite sure I would be able to pull it off. Fortunately, Theo Belmas, who was originally the Head of Photography, was promoted to the Head of Media position and placed under me in the org chart. Theo was an incredibly talented photographer, who also new his way around graphic design, which was reassuring. However, as he was a busy senior at the time, I knew that I would have to develop new skills and take a majority of the work under my wing.

I’m not going to take you through everything that happened over the course of the next few months, because that would simply be too arduous— no joke, I could probably write a book about my experiences. Nevertheless, despite my concerns, and despite some minor hiccups here and there, after a lot of late nights we managed to pull everything through and keep the COMUN tech game going strong; I even won the revered, most committed and dedicated EXCO member award, and the IT creativity award in the end, whilst also growing at least ten fold as an individual. I got a lot of support from the then secretary general, Amanda Amarawansha, the rest of the secretariat as well as Ms. Jasmine Bhattercharjie, the COMUN faculty advisor, along the way, but it took a lot of work doing everything single-handedly. COMUN had become my largest extra-curricular commitment, and despite the challenge, I enjoyed every moment of being Head of Tech. Nevertheless, as the 2017-2018 academic year drew to a close and we began to look toward COMUN 2018 I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself, yet again. I was embarking on my IBDP journey, and knew that I wouldn’t have the time nor energy to do so for COMUN 2018. Moreover, COMUN 2018 would mark the 25th session of the conference and would be held at a much grander scale than ever before, which would definitely lead to more work for the tech team. Therefore, my first challenge as Head of Tech for COMUN XXV(25) was to form a capable, and loyal tech team that would be there to support me along the way.

Forming my Tech Team

The first event in the COMUN calendar is the EXCO interviews, and as the Head of Tech I am responsible for managing the online application form and the interview reservation system. Moreover, along with the secretariat, I had to be a part of the interview process on the day and minute the interviewee responses. I was particularly excited for the interview, because it gave me the opportunity to put together my tech team. Together with the rest of the secretariat, I had decided that this year the tech team would include two Deputy Heads of Technology. Initially, I wanted to choose some younger students for these positions, in order to prepare for my succession. I had experienced the challenge of wrestling with the tech workload, whilst being alien to the whole COMUN scene and didn’t want anyone to go through it again.

However, I couldn’t find any young individuals, who had the passion and drive for tech that the COMUN Head of Tech position demanded. Instead, I had three applicants vying for these two positions — Youzhi Wang from the 12th grade, and Divyanshu Thakur and Milo Pringiers, from the 11th grade. After the interview I had to make a pretty difficult decision because it was pretty clear that all of these three candidates seemed to have similar skills, and experience. Because we had no candidates interested in photography, or videography, we decided that Milo would take the Head of Media position and Youzhi and Divyanshu would be the Co-Deputy Heads of Tech. Milo was chosen for the Head of Media position because he had more experience than the other two with the Adobe suite, video editing and graphic design. I was pretty happy with the tech team I had put together; from the very first meeting everyone on the team exemplified the commitment and loyalty I was looking for in my tech team. Now that I had my team, it was time to get working…

The Website

The COMUN website was launched for the first time by Khalis Khaleel, COMUN 2017’s Head of Tech, and has been the hub for all things COMUN ever since. Khalis used Adobe Muse, an application that allows you to make beautiful websites without a single line of code. In 2018, because I was already overwhelmed with all the other work that came along with being the head of tech, I didn’t attempt to overhaul the website, but merely updated the already existing muse site. Although the muse site did the job without any major hiccups, it was quite slow to load and a hassle to update because the exported HTML files were very large. Therefore, this year, as it was the 25th session of COMUN as well, I decided to build a better website from scratch. I had to put up the first version of the website a few weeks into the COMUN calendar because it was the access point for EXCO application and interview scheduling. This initial site was had a very simple, single page layout that contained links to these resources. After the interviews, I began building the website to be launched at the upcoming delegate workshop in December. Because the website’s main purpose is to deliver information to participants, I built it using HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript for visual elements like animations, but the website didn’t include any sort of backend because it was not required. Building it from scratch gave me the power to tweak things to maximize performance.

In terms of the structure, the website was pretty similar to its predecessor. Therefore, like last year, the website’s homepage included a countdown to conference, links to the various committee pages, and links to contact and registration information. The committee pages included each committee’s study guide, and some basic information about the committee and its head table. The website also included information pages for the community service project, about COMUN, rules and regulations and other general notices about the conference. One change I made with regards to the structure of the website was deciding to remove the website’s blog feed. I chose to do this because last year, I tried on many occasions to get someone on the EXCO to be responsible for the blog and post regular updates on it, to no avail. Although the structural changes were kept to a minimum, I made plenty of changes to the visual aspect of the site. Changes were made to the menu bar, font, and color scheme in accordance with a more minimal and sleek design language. Overall, I was very impressed with the finished COMUN website, it performed and looked much better than its Adobe Muse predecessor. And the analytics data from the website clearly highlights the engagement between the participants and the website. Between its launch at the Delegate workshop in December and the final day of conference in March, the website had over ______ users, and over 18,500 page visits, with an average usage time of 3 minutes. Also, the graph in the below analytics data show clear spikes in traffic a few days before every COMUN event like the practice debates; this shows the importance of the website as a resource to participants at COMUN.

 

The Points System

I did some work with Machine Learning and Data Science during the summer of my sophomore year, and as a result I initially planned on taking the points system from last year and making it a bit smarter. However, with the workload of the IBDP, and other responsibilities within the COMUN tech space, this never came to fruition. Instead, the points system remained pretty much the same with merely some minor patches and bug fixes. I built the points system last year using Java and MySQL for the backend and Angular.js for the front end. As seen in the images below, the UI is pretty simple. When a chair logs in he/she sees a basic form, which includes fields for country, speech type and number of points. These fields have a built-in autofill feature and the country flags would pop up on screen for the chosen country. Visually, the points system stayed the same, however, I made quite a few changes on the back end in order to improve performance and the overall user experience.

Of course, the first change was with regards to the databases that powered the back end; countries, and committees had to be changed based on this year’s country matrix— the country’s present in each committee. We also changed the country flag presentation aspect on the backend by creating our own database of country flag images instead of relying on a third-party dataset. This allowed for better performance and no more image missing errors, because we were storing and serving up only the flags we needed. There were also some changes to the structure of the points, which were prescribed by the secretariat, such as increasing the highest score for certain types of speeches or adding new speech types all together. Also, because the points system is the key resource used during the awards selection process, we also made significant changes to improve the security of the system. Passwords were longer, more complex, regularly updated and encrypted before transmission and storage. We received a lot of great feedback from chairs and the secretariat alike; an especially proud moment for the myself and the rest of the tech team was when Viren, the President of the General Assemblies from COMUN 2017 complemented the new points system and how the “flag pops up is very cool”, when he visited a practice debate. The points system has clearly come a long way since I took up the role of Head of Tech; however, one concern I have is whether my successors will have the technical know-how in order to manage and update the code that powers the system.

Design & Printing

Having gone through the whole design and printing process once before, and also having a strong team behind me, the design and printing challenge was much less daunting than last year. We designed all material from the delegate ID cards, and placards to the souvenir magazine and the digital content for the opening and closing ceremonies. We began by designing a special COMUN logo for the 25^th session that would be used in all our designs for the rest of the year. In order to signify the 25^th anniversary of COMUN, we replaced the traditional globe between the wings of the COMUN dove with the letters XXV. Having designed a special logo, we moved onto designing the sponsorship prospectus, which is basically the key resource utilized by EXCO members to sell COMUN as a great marketing opportunity for businesses across Sri Lanka. The sponsorship prospectus was very professionally done by Chayan last year, so we didn’t change much; we only had to update some of the information about the conference and include some clarification and changes to the benefits and other marketing information for each tier of sponsorship.

Then we began working on the material that take the longest time to be produced: the T-Shirts and the delegate bags. Like the previous year, the exco T-shirt was a polo shirt with a collar, and the admin/delegate shirts were ordinary T-shirts. The main differences in the T-shirts was a shift from navy blue to black in the EXCO shirts and the new logo across all shirts. When it came to the bag, we moved away from the pouch with zipper used in the last few years to a cloth bag that had more space and utility. The design however, remained pretty much the same with mentions of COMUN, the logo, and the session number and year. After designing the T-Shirt and delegate bags, we moved onto designing templates for the committee study guides, which were published after the delegate workshop in December. Like last year, each committee was allocated a color scheme and a backdrop image based on their conference topic. All committee material, starting with the study guide, incorporated either the color or the backdrop in some way, shape or form in order to give some uniformity to all the content produced by the individual committees. After the study guides, came the major printing workload: starting with the ID cards.

Divyanshu designed all of the ID cards this year; like last year, the delegate ID cards included the committee name and committee color scheme, and the EXCO ID cards included a photograph of the EXCO member, their name and position. Putting all the ID cards together for over 400 participants was quite a challenge and took almost an entire practice debate worth of work (8AM – 5 PM) to complete. We also had to design the delegate notepads, gavels, certificates and EXCO name pins, which were all relatively simple changes to the designs used last year. Next came the big jobs of designing the placards, and souvenir magazine. Designing the placards, which are the signs raised by delegates to obtain the floor and vote, was extremely time consuming because I had to change the country flag and name on photoshop almost 400 times for each of the delegates in every committee. This year however, together with Youzhi, I learnt about Photoshop’s batch processing feature that allowed you to export files with varying elements based on a dataset. In our case, the variable elements on the photoshop file were the country name and flag image; photoshop extracted information about these elements from a dataset we created and exported each as an individual file. We ran into a few format errors with the images and setting up the dataset was a bit of a hassle but compared to doing everything manually batch processing was highly efficient. When it came to the souvenir magazine, things were much easier this time around because having done it last year, I was well aware of the format and contents. Youzhi designed the cover, and everything else was put together on Adobe InDesign for printing.

When the time came for printing, I had to go spend a few days with the printers, do some formatting, add bleeds and margins and add various other final touches to the designs. I had done the same last year, but this time I made sure to go over to them and see the first print of every design in order to ensure the final product met my expectations. In addition to the print resources, we also had to design the digital resources for presentation at all COMUN events. This was pretty simple, after we made a template layout on PowerPoint for the first event, we just mixed and matched content using that thereafter. Overall, the designs we did for COMUN XXV were professionally done, and of a high standard; they also added a bit of flair to the conference as this was its 25^th iteration.

Media

With so many participants, COMUN is one of the most important academic events in Sri Lanka, and as a result, media is a very important aspect of the conference. As mentioned above, Milo Pringiers joined the COMUN tech team as the Head of Media and under my guidance he was at the helm of the media ship. There are three main aspects to COMUN Media, the Livestreams, photography and videography. Both COMUN’s opening and closing ceremonies are usually livestreamed by the OSC tech team, with support from COMUN’s tech team. This year as well, the livestream was conducted similarly; however, for the first time we used 3 cameras instead of the usual 1 or 2 camera livestreams. This made the livestream a more engaging experience for remote viewers.

In terms of photography, Milo carried a camera around during all COMUN events from the first delegate workshop to the final closing ceremony and took over 2000 pictures in total. These pictures were all then post processed and edited on Lightroom by either me, Milo, Divyanshu or Youzhi. Thereafter, they were watermarked and uploaded on the COMUN website; some were also posted on our social media channels. For the first time in a long time, this year, we didn’t outsource any of the photography or hire any photographers from outside of COMUN. Everything was handled by the COMUN tech team, which is quite a remarkable achievement.

When it came to videography, we made three videos in total. The first, an introduction to the COMUN theme, which was “Reconstituting Global Perspectives”, was done from start to finish by Youzhi and then presented at the Delegate Workshop in December. I made the intro video to COMUN for the opening ceremony, which included some of the key topics the participants would discuss. I followed a very similar style and structure as I had done last year in terms of the music, footage, text and the other decisions I made. It was presented at both the opening and closing ceremonies as it gave guests a good idea about what COMUN is and what it stands for. Then we have the COMUN Conference Recap video.

I’ve made a lot of videos over the year, and the COMUN conference recap video we produced is probably the best video I have ever been a part of. The recap video is basically the final thing we show at the closing ceremony; a video that includes footage from all of the COMUN events throughout the year. As usual, we got the footage during the three days of conference and edited together during that time as well. Milo was the main editor, whilst Youzhi, Divyanshu and I collected the footage he required for the video. It was Milo’s first time editing a video on Adobe Premiere, so I had to give him guidance with the basics on the program. Nevertheless, despite it being his first video, Milo delivered a piece of work that is nothing short of excellent. We also added a tech easter egg at the very end of the video, just for a bit of fun and also to show the tech team behind all of the work at COMUN. When we showed the video at the closing ceremony, the response was remarkable; the room was full of cheers almost every few seconds and the tech part was especially loved. The final video can be seen below.

Final Thoughts

COMUN XXV is probably going to be the last time I participate in COMUN as the Head of Technology because it will just be too much of a challenge doing so with the workload in my senior year. I think COMUN XXV was a fitting ending to my COMUN story; I enjoyed every bit of going through the challenge, and especially going through it all with a great team supporting me all the way. Nevertheless, these past two years of COMUN have been an amazing experience and probably one of my most enriching extra curricular experiences. I’ve learnt so much not just within the tech space, but also with regards to leadership, working with a team, and just being committed to something and getting stuff done really well. I have no doubt that the skills I’ve learnt from COMUN will not just help me in my academic journey, but also in my professional journey in the workplace. I have to thank Ms. Jasmine Bhattercharjie, the COMUN Facilitator, the secretariats of COMUN 2018 and 2019, and everyone else, who helped me out along the way. Over the last 25 years COMUN has developed thousands of young leaders and given each one of them a unique story; this I guess, is the end of my COMUN story…