Investigating new ways to make our forums, seminars and conferences available to more of our members, other community sector organisations and the general public - especially those in rural and regional areas - NCOSS has started trialling live webcasting. Recently, during our Vote 1 Fairness Election Forums held in Merimbula and Cooma at the end of May, we utilised wireless broadband, our laptop and a webcamera to televise several hours worth of proceedings from both locations.

The webcast is sent live through a third party provider (ustream.com) and can then be watched in real time by anyone with a web-enabled device either directly through u-Stream or via an embedded frame on our website: www.ncoss.org.au/webcast (an added bonus for watching it on our site is no advertisements for soft drinks and American TV shows!)

At Cooma the webcast covered an education/information session on ‘big picture’ issues and the work NCOSS is doing. On the next day, at Merimbula, we presented a politician’s forum - featuring Andrew Constance, Liberals MP and Member for Bega; Penny Sharpe, ALP MLC, and; Sylvia Hale, Greens MLC - discussing their party’s policy positions and why they are a vote for fairness.

For the most part there were surprisingly few technical hiccups, and the technology set-up was straight-forward and only took a few minutes. Whilst there were not many viewers there had also been limited promotion for the webcast and it is still a fairly novel concept for many. We’re intending to provide more webcasts in the near future and, as it becomes a more commonly used form of technology, expect it to reach a wider audience.

Our next scheduled webcast is Wednesday 9 June @ 2pm-4pm - NCOSS will hold a Budget briefing for the community sector today (the day after the handing down of the NSW State Budget) and give feedback on our preliminary analysis of the Budget by portfolio area. To watch, simply tune in to www.ncoss.org.au/webcast from 2pm (as we develop a schedule of upcoming events there will also be a program listed on that page).