Edition One. Two days, six committees and a room full of people who do not yet know how good they are.
The name
The old walls were built to face it. The bridges exist because of it. Ask anyone in Ahmedabad where something is and they answer you in one of two words: this side, or that side.
The river is the sentence the whole city is written in. And for most of its life it was empty. Sand. A dry road through the middle of town that people set up markets on, flew kites over, walked across in slippers.
Ahmedabad built five hundred years on a river that wasn't there, then decided it should be, and made it run.
That is the trick this place has always had. Build first. Fill it later. It is also, more or less, what happens to a delegate somewhere in hour six of day one, when the room turns and the bloc collapses and somebody they have never met takes their clause apart in forty seconds.
You will find out what you actually do under pressure. You will find out on a riverbank.
Made to flow
It was a road of sand. It runs year-round now because the city decided it should. Drag the handle and put the water back.
Dry bed
Year-round
Drag, or use the arrow keys
Six rooms
Agendas are announced closer to the conference. Study guides go live for every committee once they drop.
Where moral consensus meets national interest and one of them has to lose. You will defend a record you did not write.
The crime crosses four borders in a week. The people chasing it need a treaty to make one phone call.
The most underestimated room at any conference, and the one where sentiment does not survive the first point of information.
Won by the member who has read the rulebook, not the one who shouted through it. A point of order lands harder than a speech.
No countries. No protocol. No foreign ministry to hide behind. Loudest committee at the conference, hardest one to actually win.
The only committee that watches every other committee. Everyone else debates. You decide what survives.
The host city
A walled old city of pols and carved timber, a stepwell you descend into to escape the heat, a sky full of kites every January, and a riverfront that took fifty years of arguing to build.
Edition One
That is the honest opening. There is no legacy here, no fifteenth edition, no wall of photographs from conferences you have heard about. There is a name, a river, a date, and a group of people who decided this city needed one of these done properly.
If you want to be able to say you were at the first one, this is the only year that sentence is available.
The thing that actually happened on this riverbank was not a holiday. It was a small group walking off a sandbank with no plan anyone believed in, and a country breaking the law alongside them twenty-four days later. It started unfashionable and underfunded and it worked. We are aware of the parallel. We are using it on purpose.
Registrations
Delegate applications, Executive Board applications and the full committee brief are released together. Follow along, or write to us and we will tell you first.
Until the first session opens