The following is a guest post written by Johnathon Seese, a Model UN Alumni and now the Director of the Online Crisis League.
The Online Crisis League is the first ever online collegiate Model United Nations experience. Join us as we conquer all of Britain and Ireland! We are actively looking for delegates and staffers, and would love for you to join us! You can check us out at www.onlinecrisisleague.org.
The Online Crisis League hope to be the foremost online simulator for Model United Nations at the collegiate level. Consisting of current and former Model UN delegates, we are a diverse group hoping to reach across the entire United States and eventually the world. Our goal is to make Online Model UN more detailed and thorough compared to traditional in-person committee experienced. Delegates have all the time to prepare crisis notes, and crisis staff has a sizable chunk of time to put detail into their responses due to the online platform. By doing this we hope to eventually create a Model UN experience that is far more sophisticated than any physical conference could be.
To explain a little more about how the online platform works, I’ll talk about the usage of a Forum. Forums are online boards where individuals can post topics and replies to those topics in a variety of ways. Polls can be created, voting can take place, and debate can be done. More information regarding forums and their use can be found here.
Here’s how our forums operate:
The Forum is split into various sections for each Committee (in our case, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). From there, individual groups of characters have their own Personal Offices. A Personal Office is a fancy way of saying “crisis notes”. In each Personal Office, which is password protected and visible only to each character and the Moderators, crisis notes can be created. This works in two ways; players themselves can create their own crisis notes and have them responded to by Moderators; and Moderators can create individual crisis scenarios for each character individually, to be responded to by the player. Updates to the Committees will be given in news areas, where individual situations will develop and be reported to the Committees at large.
Royal Banner of Scotland
Our first topic is Britain and Ireland in 1066. We also use a sophisticated 8-way Joint Crisis Committee set-up. There are two main “governments” at the time: the kingdoms of England and Scotland. These two governments have representatives to the King’s court as players, including Bishops, Stewards, and military commanders. But not only that, but our other two committees – Ireland and Wales – are divided into 3 separate committees. We want these committees to be fluid and dynamic, and as such everything will progress from the player’s actions. Occasionally the Mod team will throw in a proposal to spur debate, but history is completely up to the players.
Royal Banner of England
The OCL is free for use to all college students and adults. We aren’t fundraising for any school, and hope to encompass the entire United States and eventually the world. We are completely volunteer based, both from our players and staffers. Delegates and staffers can choose to join us at their own interest, and staffers serve in a variety of roles.
Currently I am attending Law School and no longer directly involved in the collegiate Model UN circuit. I decided to create the OCL last year after a dry-run with the FGCU Model UN team. We found that the online debates focused on detailed policy issues, and delved far into governing and policy making more so than any physical conference we’ve attended. I’ve been involved in Model UN for the past 8 years, and being able to take it to a new level has been an exciting challenge for me and one that I hope to see you, if you’re reading this right now, partake in.
So come on over and join us! You can get involved by visiting www.onlinecrisisleague.org. Be a part of the first online collegiate and adult Model UN experience!
