Chat room, forum and login options

I'm a firm believer that if there is a technology out there that allows you to do something, there is no point in rewriting code to do the same thing. With my current PHP skills, I don't think creating a chat room or a forum would be very successful, for example. Instead I will use alternate systems that can be implemented with the rest of my website.

Chat room
Besides the typical delayed debate option, where one delegate posts something and another replies in a few hours or days, I also want to have a chat room system available. A small number of delegates (10 at most) would enter a private chat room at a set time and have a regular debate for maybe 30mn.
I decided to use a system called PHPOpenChat. This free chat system was developed by a group of programmers and you can basically add the code to your page to have a simple chatroom that you can customize. There were many systems available but PHPOpenChat was the most developed and it had the most documentation available.


Facebook Connect
Registration is a long and painful process, and it's also a little hard to set up. I have been on a few websites, however, that allow you to create an account on their site using your regular Facebook account. I looked this up and found out Facebook developed an API called Facebook Connect, that lets websites other than Facebook use your facebook account for various things - simply logging in, commenting, sharing pictures...
I want to give my visitors the option of connecting to my website using Facebook, as my target group is the kind that will most likely have a social network account. This way, if the registration process I code for my website myself doesn't work, visitors can still log in using Facebook Connect. It will also make registration much faster for people who just want to have a look.


reCAPTCHA
Captchas are the little registration confirmation codes that require you to read two words that are strangely twisted to make sure you're not a computer. I want to prevent my website from being attacked by any type of hackers, so I chose to use captchas. reCAPTCHAS are very easy to implement - you can simply add a few lines of code to your registration page. I also chose them because they have options such as an audible captcha for blind people and are therefore accessible to everyone.

phpBB
phpBB is a technology used to create discussion forums. I want a discussion forum for my users to discuss matters outside MUN. phpBB allows you to create very complex, customizable forums that are afterwards easily managed, and it's free, so it's by far my first choice. Many phpBB forums can be found throughout the internet as it is the leading technology for creating simple discussion forums.

Meebo bar
As an added functionality, I want my users to be able to chat with their other messaging accounts (Google Mail, Facebook, MSN, Yahoo...) while they are on WEBMUN. I think this will keep people connected longer. For this I found a very simple solution called the Meebo Bar - a simple bar at the bottom of the page from which you can connect to all your other clients. This is once again very simple to implement.

Links
http://www.phpopenchat.org/
http://www.facebook.com/connectnews?v=app_7146470109
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/PHP/Chat-Systems/1
http://bar.meebo.com/

Committees and countries to include

As part of my WEBMUN website, I need to decide on a number of committees I want people to be part of online. I would like to stick to the more typical MUN committees, as I don't have time to create various debating layouts to accommodate different types of debate. Here are therefore the committees I cannot include:
-Youth Assembly
-International Court of Justice

I looked up a number of conferences throughout the world such as THIMUN in The Hague, and BEIMUN in Beijing, to get an idea of the issues and committees present in MUN. I decided that WEBMUN should include 3 committees to start with - the General Assembly, the Human Rights Commission and the Security Council. The General Assembly allows many members to join as it can have up to 290 countries, and the other two provide smaller and varied committees.

I decided for WEBMUN to debate the same issues inside the committees as were discussed in The Hague in 2010. These issues are therefore very recent and since they were used during this conference, they are most likely good debate sparkers. Here are my issues for each committee:

General Assembly

• Creating a legal framework for the issue of cyber warfare.

• Ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba

Human Rights Commission

• Measures to combat discrimination and social isolation of the disabled

• Ensuring the right to food for all, without discrimination

Security Council

• Nuclear disarmament of Iran and North Korea
  

I am only including a few issues in each committee because debate online is bound to be somewhat slow. If there are too many issues available, there will be little debate over each. I would rather have 30 people arguing over one thing a little bit every week than the members losing interest because none of their points have been answered.

Every country is included in the General Assembly, the full list of which may be found here. I wanted to use the countries of the Security Council in 2011 for my own Security Council, but they have not been voted yet. Instead I used the list of members in 2010:
-China
-France
-Russia
-England
-USA
-Austria
-Japan
-Turkey
-Bosnia
-Lebanon
-Uganda
-Brazil
-Mexico
-Uganda
-Nigeria

There are 47 members of the Human Rights council whose list can be found here.

Wikipedia contributors. "United Nations Human Rights Council." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Apr. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.

"Membership of the Security Council." United Nations. Security Council. 13 Apr. 2010

Wikipedia contributors. "List of United Nations member states." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 Mar. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.

THIMUN. The Hague International Model United Nations. 2010. 13 Apr. 2010 <"http://www.thimun.org/">

Criterion C - Plan

I thought we had until the end of the year so I planned to create a website that may be a little overambitious to create in a month. However, it's always good to challenge myself and since computer programming is something I enjoy, I think I should be able to finish my website on time if I work once or twice over the week-ends.

Here is my tentative plan for the creation of WEBMUN:

(Click on it to see the larger version)