From the 4th to the 7th of June, the Worlds Debating Council will cast a vote. The council is the place where representatives of every debating nation decide on important common issues. This time, council will decide about the most important issue in the debating world: Who will host the World University Debating Championships (WUDC) from December 27th 2013 to Jan 4th 2014 and be the successor of Berlin Worlds 2013? Two universities are bidding for that honour: The Rajalakshmi Engineering College (REC) of Chennai (India) and the Chulalangkorn University of Bangkok (Thailand).

But this time, something is different. For the first time in the history of the WUDC, the council does not decide in a physical meeting at a giant round table about the championships. The reason: Half a year ago, when the council met in Manila, nobody was bidding. One year before, when the council sat down in a safari park in Botswana, that situation was different. Then, two cities where fighting for the goodwill of the delegates to host worlds 2013: Berlin and Zagreb answered all questions from the council – and Berlin ended up convincing most nations. Yay! That meant, that Berlin had two years to prepare everything – a timespan needed to mount such a big tournament.

At WUDC in Manila, however, nobody showed interest. This is why council decided to postpone that vote by 6 months – enough time for universities to prepare a bid and with 18 months left until the start, enough time to actually organize it. The only problem: In June, it’s hard to bring all delegates together since we’re all students from all around the world. And this is the historic part: That’s why we’re virtual and do the diligence in a forum.

The German delegation also has votes – four votes, since we are a status A nation. “A” nations are countries that have had four different institutions at worlds for two consecutive years. In order for the German delegation to make a rational decision, I have compiled a table that weighs the two bids against each other and is open to editing by the prospective conveners of each bid. For anyone who is interested it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at that table – most council delegates consider that table as part of their decision making as well.

It will be thrilling and we can be sure, that many questions will still pop up. In general, we are really happy about the fact that both, Chulalangkorn and Chennai, have put together very good bids – I’m sure that WUDC 2014 will be great!

Marcus Ewald/pst