An online
international relations simulation run by the
University of Maryland. It is designed to allow high-school and college students to practice
diplomacy,
compromise and general argumentative tactics.
The simulation is generally administered by a local university. For
SoCal is happens to be
Whittier College.
Each school or class involved chooses a country they want to be (i.e. Germany, Japan, India, China, etc), and is given a login name and password. The teams can communicate in three ways.
1. Messages
Messages are just like e-mail and are generally very well thought out and cleverly worded.
2. Conferences
Conferences are held at set times (generally Monday through Thursday from 3pm-4pm) and are a time for realtime discussion with the other teams.
3. Proposals
Teams can make and modify proposals. Once a proposal is created, teams can offer sponsorship, and once a final version is submitted, they can vote on it.
Overall, this is a very well designed program for classes studying diplomacy or world politics. The only complaint I would raise is in the poor password choices by some of the teams that allowed a group of hackers into our simulation.
The simulation can be found at http://www.icons.umd.edu