The world of diplomacy thrives on backroom conversations and face-to-face negotiations – so what do you do when a physical event is off-limits? Technology saved the day in New Zealand’s hosting of a major global forum | Content Partnership
As the world battles Covid-19, workers everywhere have become accustomed to virtual meetings replacing their physical equivalents.
But in the early months of the pandemic, carefully laid plans for a range of major global events were thrown into chaos – including New Zealand’s long-anticipated hosting of a significant diplomatic forum.
In June last year, the Government announced it had abandoned plans to host a physical APEC forum in 2021 due to the risks and uncertainty associated with Covid-19, instead moving all events online.
While the decision may sound simple, behind the scenes there was a huge amount of work to prepare for New Zealand’s diplomats to offer delegates from around Asia Pacific a secure and seamless hosting experience. The techology solution was vital and successful provider Spark Business Group's role was key.
Chosen through a competitive tender process, Spark and CCL (both part of Spark Business Group) had just a few months to stand up a totally new platform for APEC before the first meetings were held at the end of 2020.
Speaking to Newsroom, Spark Customer Director Grant McBeath likens the process to building the aeroplane as it was flying.
“It was a fascinating challenge to be part of – we’re hugely proud of the role that we played, not only for New Zealand but for the way that Spark Business Group and a range of other local tech companies brought it together.”
With 21 APEC economies, thousands of delegates and hundreds of meetings to deliver, McBeath says the project came with a decent serving of pressure.
But the scale of the challenge, and the opportunity to develop a prototype of sorts for a large-scale diplomatic event being held entirely online, was very much part of the appeal.
“We wanted to show that New Zealand could hold its own on the international stage in terms of the experience offered to the delegates.”
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A critical part of the project was getting as close as possible to the experience of a face-to-face meeting, with adjustments for the realities of a digital format.
Spark used Microsoft Teams as its core platform for the delivery of meetings, but made a number of tweaks to meet APEC’s needs. McBeath explains, “Working with the Microsoft team, we were able to benefit from their insights and lessons from other international organisations facing similar challenges. Our CCL team then brought their expertise to bear in customising the product and processes to fit the conventions required by a diplomatic meeting.”
Spark was also tasked with creating and setting up the physical meeting rooms for the Chair to host the APEC meetings. Simply getting their hands on the technical equipment needed for the APEC meeting rooms in Wellington was no easy task, Spark service delivery manager Josie English says, with Covid disrupting global supply chains and making it harder to source the necessary gear at short notice.
APEC also requested on site tech support to work alongside the APEC tech team. “They wanted the Chair and delegates to be able to just focus on the diplomacy, so we had to set it up so that we could have a tech support person in the next room ready to help out. Plus, we had a service desk running that supported delegates right around the APEC region with any issues they encountered signing into the meetings.”
Another significant piece of work was developing a custom audio set-up, so that different officials speaking in the same APEC meeting room could weigh in as needed, without their words being picked up on the others’ microphones and creating a distraction.
English has served as Spark’s main point of contact for APEC, and says it has been “all hands on deck” since the early days of the project.
“I don't think I've ever seen us pull together so many people that quickly – on our first call, I thought, ‘Whoa, there's a lot of important people and really technical specialists on this call’. But everything ran pretty smoothly, and I was impressed with how we all came together.”
The pace hardly let up once the first meetings began: there was constant platform testing leading up to each event, to ensure that each scheduled meeting went off without a hitch. With the experience of those dialling in from abroad not entirely within their control, the team wanted to ensure they had as few variables as possible to worry about.
“The main feedback we got was really that none of the delegates ever said anything bad about the tech. If tech is working, you don't really compliment it. So it was really great not to hear anything from the delegates.”
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Security has also been a silent success. While McBeath can’t go into too much detail around the arrangements, given the understandable sensitivities, he says the protections “had to be absolutely bulletproof”.
While the technical details remain shrouded, Spark guarded against any ‘Zoom bombing’ – intrusions into a video-conference call by malicious actors – by integrating the APEC registration portal into the Microsoft Teams platform itself, so attendees could be confident everyone was who they said they were and were only permitted entry into meetings that they had specifically been invited to. To ensure the security of such a high-profile event, Spark had teams monitoring connectivity and security 24/7, with special focus on scheduled events.
Then there was the need to guard against less malicious interruptions to proceedings, such as a natural disaster, equipment malfunction or simple human error, which could disrupt a vital meeting.
With the experiences of the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes still in the memories of many, McBeath says Spark has become accustomed to planning for every possibility.
Meeting rooms had to have a rock-solid connection to the outside world. The teams designed connectivity right from the meeting rooms to the edge of the Tasman, where New Zealand connects to the rest of the world, with failover options throughout. Within the meeting rooms themselves, video screens and other equipment were mounted on trolleys so they could be quickly switched out if something failed and were protected in the event of an earthquake, while there was extra resilience and a battery back-up built into the Chair’s connection, to ensure that person never dropped out at a critical moment.
The New Zealand delegates were also set up to attend meetings from home, rather than the physical APEC meeting room site, if circumstances required – something which became crucial as the country went into a second nationwide lockdown following the Delta outbreak in August.
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Alongside the intensity of the work, there was also the challenge of scheduled meetings running into the wee hours of the morning, thanks to APEC’s need to accommodate 11 different time zones.
McBeath says there would be upwards of 20 Spark Business Group people working overnight, monitoring proceedings to quickly pick up and fix any signs of technical trouble.
“We're very deliberate with the way we roster, the way we plan, the way we allow the teams to recover from those situations.
“But I think it's also important to note we are a 24/7 business...a lot of our clients throughout the country, whether they are government agencies or enterprises or corporates, have 24/7 businesses, and so when things go bump in the night, to use an expression, we've got to make sure that we're there.”
Of course, there were a few coffees and Red Bulls to make it through the night– “I have a problem,” English says jokingly – alongside supermarket runs to replenish snack supplies and keep energy levels high.
A personal, albeit surreal, highlight came during the preparation for the special leaders’ retreat in July, when English found herself called upon by a producer to act as an unlikely stunt double.
“I assumed he needed tech support, but he said, ‘I just need you to sit here’ and he gestured towards where the Prime Minister would be sitting that night.
“He said, ‘So we're just installing this new key light, but you're the only person in the building that has long brown hair and I really need to see how it's hitting your hair’. I was pretty tired at that point, I wasn’t looking my best, and he's like, ‘Just take your hair down and just do your best Jacinda impression’.”
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Rachel Taulelei was among the delegates who entered the digital APEC year with a degree of trepidation.
Taulelei, the chair of the independent APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), was looking forward to a year of physical events and was initially taken aback by the pivot to a fully online format.
“After the initial question that everyone probably had as to ‘What on earth does that look like?’, you then settle into a moment of ‘Well, look, it's a brand new world and everyone has to adapt’.”
While it wasn’t possible to fully replicate the nature of a physical meeting, she believes the event has been “the very best version of itself in a digital space”.
“As much as I miss seeing people in person, we set ourselves a really ambitious work programme for this year and ironically, being able to work digitally has let us go perhaps a little bit harder and faster than we might otherwise. When you rely on physical meetings, you're hamstrung by time and place, whereas when you're working in a digital environment, there are few to no barriers to your ability to interact and engage.”
There have also been little glimpses of a truly New Zealand event, from the karakia and waiata at the start of meetings to the “manaaki box” sent out to ABAC members with Kiwi products, but it is the success of the technology that Taulelei says has allowed New Zealand to be a confident and professional host in a year “that is quite honestly, globally in turmoil”.
“The consistency and the reliability of the technology that we have used has made people feel comfortable that we can do the job that we have set ourselves for the year.
“I think that without that, if we had not had such a strong digital platform, there's a very good chance that ABAC and APEC would lose some degree of credibility and therefore relevance, so it was very, very important that this worked in the way that it has done.”
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So what role does digital diplomacy have in a world trying to return to normality?
Some APEC members have already indicated their desire to hold future events in person, and Taulelei says the next challenge could be figuring out how to run “hybrid” events with a mix of in-person and online attendees.
It’s not just Covid-19 that may factor into such decisions, with the carbon footprint of large-scale international events a growing concern in a world trying to tackle climate change.
“Realistically, I think that sending hundreds of people around the world four times a year, whilst it has the upside of being in each other's actual company, there is genuinely a toll that it takes on the environment.
“If we could, for instance, as a group, agree that one of those meetings at a minimum is virtual again...everyone previously would have probably died in fright at the idea but now everyone understands what it takes to have that happen and what it feels to be in these environments routinely.”
McBeath believes the company has learnt a lot from supporting APEC which it can apply to its wider work with government and business customers.
“We use a saying quite a lot within our organisation, which is not only have we read the map, but we've travelled the road. We've modernised, we've rebranded our business from Telecom to Spark, we've built cloud businesses, we’ve bought cloud businesses, we provide IT managed services, we've built big data organisations like Qrious, we've flipped at scale to Agile. Now we've steered into the challenge of delivering APEC as a completely digital event.
“So that confidence that once again, Spark Business Group has measured up alongside what our clients need us to do, and deliver to the outcomes that they need gives us confidence that we can do this for any client working in the right way.”
Spark is a foundation supporter of Newsroom.co.nz.
