Research Advisory Forum - Sydney 2015

Up to 125 researchers and end user representatives participated in the first Research Advisory Forum (RAF) for 2015, at NSW Rural Fire Service Headquarters on the 8 - 9 April 2015.

This RAF focused on the Resilience and Policy themes of our research program, with the other half of the projects lined up for the next forum later this year.

Al the presentations from the two day event are now online on the Resources tab below.

The forum was opened by the Assistant Commissioner of the NSW Rural Fire Service, Mr Stuart Midgely.

The projects relating to the following clusters attended:

• Governance and institutional knowledge
• Economics, policy and decision-making
• Scenarios and loss analysis
• Communications and warning
• Emergency management capability
• Sustainable volunteering
• Understanding and measuring social resilience

The general structure of the RAF was:

• Stakeholder briefings in a large auditorium
• Breakout sessions in parallel to the stakeholder briefings to support detailed project level discussions between researchers and end user representatives.

Project team members gave a 20 minute presentation on the state of each project while end user representatives presented for five minutes on how they thought the project was going and where it was headed in terms of potential utilisation.

A new feature for this forum was the addition of short presentations by CRC funded Phd students. Conducted in the format of the university sector's Three Minute Thesis, the students spoke enthusiastically about their progress and how it was important to the sector. Presenting at the RAF were Vicky Aerts, Douglas Brown, Bill Calcutt and Billy Haworth. The CRC plans to repeat this approach with the PhD students at other opportunities over the year, including at the annual conference in September.

Four breakout rooms were available to enable cluster and project workshops to take place simultaneously with the stakeholder briefings. All end user representatives involved with the above clusters were invited to attend.