Page (MUN)

A page in Model United Nations is a conference staff member responsible for the physical delivery of written communications inside a committee room. Because most MUN rules of procedure prohibit delegates from speaking directly across the room during formal session, delegates write note-passing messages on slips of paper and hand them to a page, who walks them to the intended recipient or to the dais (the chair, director, and rapporteur).

Pages typically perform several functions:

• Delivering inter-delegate notes during formal debate.
• Passing notes to the dais (procedural questions, requests to be added to the speakers list, points of order in writing).
• Distributing working papers, draft resolutions, and amendment copies once approved by the chair.
• Occasionally collecting roll-call ballots or voting slips in committees that use paper voting.

The role is most visible in large conferences such as NMUN, Harvard WorldMUN, HNMUN, and NHSMUN, where committee sizes of 100–300 delegates make verbal coordination impossible without a courier system. At many high school conferences, pages are local middle or high school students; at collegiate conferences, they are often first-year students from the host university's MUN team learning procedure before staffing as assistant directors.

Chairs may suspend note-passing as a disciplinary measure if pages are overwhelmed, if notes are being used to disrupt debate, or during sensitive moments such as voting procedure. In crisis committees, the page function is sometimes split: in-room notes go through pages, while crisis notes to the backroom are collected separately by crisis staff.

While the role is administrative rather than substantive, experienced MUN organizers treat paging as the entry point of the staff pipeline — a way to observe procedure, learn chairing technique, and identify future committee directors. The term derives from the parliamentary and legislative tradition of pages serving in bodies like the U.S. Congress and the UK House of Commons.