In an era of rapid change and paramount global challenges, the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) plays a pivotal role in facilitating multilateral negotiations and fostering international collaboration. What would be the ideal setting for negotiations to succeed? A study on the use of a full array of meeting modalities, from in-person to hybrid and virtual formats as well as webcasting, offers latest insights into the needs and expectations of Geneva clients. It records challenges and lessons learnt, and compares strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of different scenarios. 

• Read the full report here: Review of expanded meeting modalities at the United Nations Office at Geneva.

• Read a summary of the report in this 2-pager: Summary expanded meeting modalities.

How can the latest technology improve our interactive meeting experience? How useful is it to recreate conference centres in the metaverse? Is artificial intelligence as good as humans in summarizing UN meetings?

The CTT-2 initiative promotes conversations about developments in the world of conferences and events and how they could be used to enhance meeting experiences at the UN. The aim: creating the best possible conditions for UN Member States and other stakeholders to convene, discuss and negotiate to resolve the urgent issues of our time.

The CTT-2 video series explores topics that may inspire our thinking about how we want to meet at the UN in Geneva:

1. The future of Meetings
2. Virtual Event Platforms
3. The Multilingual Document of the Future
4. Speech-Enabled Post-Editing of Machine Translation
5. HumAInizing Humans - How can AI Augment our Meetings?

These episodes were recorded during InnoVent 2: Innovation in Conferencing (2023)
Please note that the videos are only available in English.
Contact: ctt@un.org

UNIGE students in the driving seat to make innovation and future foresight part of conference organization at UN Geneva

March - May 2023

What does it take to make UN conference organization ready for the future? To generate some fresh ideas, the Conferencing Today & Tomorrow - 2 (CTT-2) team put this challenge out to students of the Master’s in Responsible Management at the University of Geneva (UNIGE).

In a first step, student had to familiarize with meeting organization at the UN. Then they stepped into the roles of the key stakeholders of conferencing. To ideate their future needs and aspirations, the groups took the perspective of Member States, conference secretariats, NGOs and the private sector, or looked into greening conference operations and enhancing accessibility. Students followed up with their own research and interviews and came back to present their analysis and recommendations to UN colleagues who were very impressed with their work.

Some of their ideas, we thought, were worth noting:

• In a Physicalia scenario where meetings take place in-person only, new funding mechanisms were suggested to facilitate participation of delegates from Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and NGOs. Overall, students advocated for a more inclusive discussion by fostering NGO and private sector engagement. Several groups also suggested an extension of the Indico.UN platform to host more services.
• To manage a Hybridopia scenario where meetings routinely take place with the option of both, in-person and online participation, students suggested using more AI and other technology to automate complex internal planning process. To support people with hearing difficulties, the accessibility group put forward ideas about using AI-powered photorealistic synthetic sign interpreters and Natural Language Processing technologies to transform signed information into text or speech.
• To be prepared for a Metaland scenario where meetings take place predominantly in the metaverse, students recommended creating UNOG’s own metaverse, a virtual Palais des Nations. VR-kits with goggles could be lent to NGOs, allowing them to join meetings from where they are.

Regardless of the scenario, several groups advised the UN to establish a permanent Innovation Division and an emerging technologies fund to increase the related resources.

Some of the students’ ideas may sound too far off into the future. But as we have seen with COVID, the future sometimes may be closer than we think.

What are your thoughts about making conference organization ready for the future? Write to us at ctt@un.org.

Viviane Brunne, Conferencing Today & Tomorrow – 2