Suppose you need to research the establishment of the United Nations Youth Office.

You have several resources available. You could refer to resolution A/RES/76/306 for the adopted text establishing the office.

Check the verbatim record A/76/PV.102 of the meeting or consult the meeting summary in the Journal of the United Nations.

You could find a list of related resolutions, read the procedural scripts prepared for the presiding officer of the meeting, or find the related schedule which announced that action would be taken on the draft resolution.

But did you know that many of these documents contain the same information, just in different formats and prepared at different times?

For the past 75 years, the Secretariat used a “document-driven” approach in recording what happens during intergovernmental negotiations.

All documents were prepared and updated manually with the same information duplicated in multiple documents.

The same piece of information could appear as many as 84 times in these different documents!

In 2021, to streamline the process of supporting intergovernmental negotiations and the production of related documents, the Department for General Assembly and Conference Management (DGACM) started exploring a more “data-driven” approach to information recorded during intergovernmental meetings as part of the e-deleGATE project.

Instead of treating each piece of data in a silo, the project team created a new data model, which considered all data sources related to intergovernmental meetings as a whole and identified cross-cutting data sources that are replicable in different documents.

This new approach allowed for the automation of the production of related documents using different templates.

Repetitive data are extracted from the data bank to be used in different templates to produce a varied range of products, such as General Assembly Committee reports and procedural notes.

The same data can also be used to generate a Journal of the United Nations summary in six official languages.

Likewise, agenda information can be used to update the status of consideration of agenda items and to update the tables for agenda annotations.

If you work in a technical secretariat of an intergovernmental body and would like to see a demo, reach out to our e-deleGATE Team.