So far the Secretariat and Executive Committee (EXCO) have been very busy in preparation for the Practice Debates (PDs) as well as the final conference. To this end, during early-mid January, I shared the live registrations allowing schools and private delegates to register for the 30th COMUN conference. Registrations were officially closed on January 25th, at which point country matrices were released by the Secretariat, allocating every delegation with specific countries in different committees.
Since then the EXCO have organized and held a number of events to give all participants of COMUNs 30th session a space to prepare for the final conference. These events included a Delegate Workshop, PDs 1 & 2 of standard MUN debating , and PD 3 featuring a crisis debate.
The workshop was held on January 21st at the Overseas School of Colombo, aiming to bring in novice delegates and introduce them to the committees that we are simulating this year as well as exposing them to COMUN debate procedure.
Later, PDs 1 and 2 were also held at the Overseas School of Colombo, on January 27th and February 3rd respectively. During the PDs, committees held discussions which simulated the procedure and debate found during the actual conference and thus helped delegates prepare for the conference, allowing them to experience COMUN before being thrown into the competitive debate of the conference as well as allowing the organizers to identify any possible logistical problems with running the event.
Similarly PD 3 was also hosted at the Overseas School of Colombo on February 18th, however this time simulating a crisis style Model United Nations (MUN) debate. Crisis Committees result in very fast-paced discussions and a need for faster decision making than in any other form of MUN discussion due to their dynamic nature and are typically held on the third day of our COMUN conferences.
Lastly, COMUN’s Community Service (CS) branch has been working closely with Sri Lanka MUN (SLMUN) to develop this year’s community service programme. This programme is held every year with slight autonomy from the COMUN conference itself, where schools involved in the conference work with COMUN’s CS organizers to donate and give back to the community. This year COMUN will be constructing “essential needs” boxes consisting of a combination of food and sanitary products. These will be distributed to a school located in Nagamadu village in the Vanathvil Divisional Secretariat in Puttalam. This school holds both Sinhala and Tamil children who live below the poverty line, many of whom are also orphans. This year we have over 20 schools who will be donating various food and sanitary items to be distributed amongst this community in need.
Overall COMUN XXX has achieved a number of things, however we have also faced a number of challenges even thus far. During the PDs we faced a number of difficulties in ensuring that everything ran smoothly. This ranged from overseeing delegate registrations and movements while on the OSC campus, working out lunch catering logistics and payments, coordinating with the campus security and service staff regarding room access and setup, coordination with the OSC accounts team to arrange vendor payments on time, etc. Nevertheless we were able to pull these events off successfully, and they gave us a great opportunity to take note of various logistical aspects of a conference at OSC, allowing us to ensure that it wont happen on the day of the conference.
Learning Outcomes:
- LO1: Demonstrates awareness of strengths and areas for growth.
- LO2: Demonstrates initiation of student led activities.
- LO3: Demonstrates self-challenging, learning development of new skills.
- LO4: Demonstrates perseverance in action.
- LO5: Demonstrates collaboration and working with others.
- LO6: Demonstrates work with global values.
- LO7: Demonstrates a consideration of ethical implications.
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