SEOMUN XXIII: An Unexpected Success?

Photo of a SEOMUN Zoom conference room

When news of SEOMUN XXIII’s cancellation arrived, everyone who had signed up for the conference was heartbroken as SEOMUN is one of the most renowned conferences in the South East Asia region. However, with the announcing of the cancellation of an in-person conference, the SEOMUN team also said they would be pivoting to an online conference.

This is something that has never been done before, and it came with quite a few doubts. Junior Andrew Z. said, “I was quite doubtful of the event as an online conference seems to ruin the whole purpose of MUN.”

However, thanks to the hard work of the SEOMUN leadership team, the event was quite a success. Andrew Z. said, “I didn’t go into the event expecting too much, but the organization and how well the event flowed really surprised me.”

The leadership team put together Zoom protocols for nearly everything, using the built-in functions to emulate a MUN conference as much as possible, such as using the raise hand feature to replicate raising a placard to ask a question. However, doing the conference online had its obvious constraints. Alex K., one of the SEOMUN chairs said, “I suffered from quite a few internet problems throughout the conference, with my committee ever so kindly pointing it out, however, I thought the debates and conference as a whole went incredibly well. My major complaint with the online format is how easily accessible Google is, which provides delegates with an easy tool to get themselves out of a sticky situation, which takes away a lot of the risk of speaking. However, this could also be a good thing as it encourages shyer delegates to speak more.”

When asked about her opinion on the conference, Bobo L. replied, “I thought the whole thing went very smoothly, but besides internet issues, I thought that the most limiting part of the online format was how it took away a lot of the best parts of MUN, which was meeting new people in person and hanging out with them during lunch and stuff.”

This year’s SEOMUN was quite a success, having attended the event personally, I thought it was quite well put together. Hopefully, this is the first and last online SEOMUN conference.