Procedure Guides, Flow of Committee, and Expectations of Crisis

 Hello again delegates!

As conference approaches, I'd like to discuss a little bit our committees procedure and our expectations for how committee will flow and how you will engage with it.

Procedure 

Our committee(s) will use standard BMUN crisis procedure. From our collective experience as chairs, we believe that this procedure is the best method to promote thoughtful debate while also enabling the dynamic nature of crisis committees. This procedure also lends itself to our committees in that delegates will be representing members of a sort of cabinet or alliance that must discuss and debate on what  collective actions to take as a united front while also getting regular updates to the situation of Spain. 

For those of you not familiar with BMUN or any crisis procedure, I'll give a brief overview here. Crisis committees at BMUN use similar procedures to General Assembly committees with some key differences. We will facilitate discussion in committee with moderated and unmoderated caucuses, just like in GAs, however the small size of crisis committees also allows us to use the round robin caucus, which is helpful for getting an idea on how everyone in committee feels about a certain topic or giving introductions. We also do not have a speakers list, instead our default state is just a perpetual moderated caucus. Delegates can get things done through directives. Directives are documents usually written in bullet points or numbers that, unlike resolutions, use action-oriented language which, if passed, will create an immediate change to the universe based on the language of the directive. These directives come in 3 forms: public, which are drafted and voted on by the committee; private, which are written by individual delegates and take action using your respective portfolio powers; and joint directives, which are like private directives but can involve more than one delegate and will combine these delegates portfolio powers. Public directives are presented and voted on much less formally than in GA; delegates can motion to "present directives" or to "vote on directives" as they and the dais see fit. Caucuses can and will be interrupted at any time for crisis updates, in which we will inform you about developments in the crisis universe through news announcements, skits, or more. Crisis is a balance between frontroom (in person committee where you engage in debate and draft and pass public directives to advance the interests of your committee as a whole) and backroom (the overall crisis universe where you use private and joint (and even sometimes public) directives to advance your characters personal agenda). Frontroom and backroom collide in crisis updates, which give the committee insight into what is publicly available about the state of the backroom as decided by the dais.

Expectations for Flow of Committee

Because crisis is dynamic in that the state of the universe is constantly changing, time must also progress throughout the committee. As stated in the topic synopsis, committee starts on October 1st, 1936. We are planning for our committee to take place over the proceeding 3 years, about the length of the real war, meaning each committee session will represent about 9 months. This will allow you to enact actions in directives that would realistically take significant periods of time to implement, such as moving troops across Spain or building up caches of supplies and resources. Please keep this in mind as you prepare your crisis arcs.

Committee will start with a round robin caucus to allow for delegates to introduce their characters to the committee and dais. After that, we will give you all a crisis update, and the rest of committee will flow organically. It should be fun and probably very chaotic!

Expectations for Crisis

As a longtime crisis delegate, I certainly know the fun of crazy, violent crisis arcs filled with military actions, assassinations, and coups. Seeing that this is a wartime committee, we know that many of you will lean into these types of actions for your crisis arcs and backroom strategy. However, we want to emphasize that BMUN is a learning conference. Our goal through this committee is to educate delegates about topics we think are both interesting and important. This goal has some important implications for what we are looking for in crisis and backroom in this committee that we'd like to highlight here.

In an effort to reward delegates who demonstrate an eagerness and effort to learn about the Spanish Civil War and its nuances, we will be giving special consideration to crisis actions that utilize the kind of knowledge about the topic that we are trying to convey. This means not just taking actions using military might or tactics to become a dictator of Spain, but rather thoughtful, creative crisis actions which use both your characters portfolio powers and an understanding of the situation in Spain to take actions to advance your character's unique personal and policy aspirations. 

An example of what we would like to see would be to increase one's character's popularity with a certain population of Spain by appealing to their ideology/beliefs/wants or needs and then leveraging that to force a policy action or to take a significant action in relation to the war. This could demonstrate an understanding of what a given group of Spaniards care about at this time in the war, research into the ideology your character or this group of Spaniards represents, and/or creative policy or military solutions which will improve the conditions of Spanish citizens while also propelling your character forward. An example of something we are not looking for as much is consistent actions throughout the conference using a character's military force to conquer this or that region of Spain through advanced military tactics culminating with a military coup that puts you in power. All this would demonstrate is a knowledge of battle tactics and Spanish geography, which are not the kinds of learning goals we have in mind for this committee.

For a better understanding of what kind of things we hope delegates learn about and demonstrate understanding of through this committee, please see our blog post on "Why We Chose This Topic". 

Thank you for reading this blogpost and your hard work in preparing for committee and writing position papers! We are looking forward to seeing you all in conference!