Purpose

The Sydney Program Committee is responsible for designing, coordinating, and delivering the annual program of events held in Sydney.

The program of events held in Sydney, which the Society either leads or co-sponsors, comprises:

1. The face-to-face and online presentations at the Ordinary General Meetings (usually held on the first Wednesday of each month between February and December)
2. The visits program, which comprises organised visits or excursions to significant sites around Sydney of broad historical, geographical, scientific or cultural interest
3. The Annual Meeting of the Four Societies, a joint lecture of the Royal Society of NSW, Engineers Australia Sydney Division, the Australian Institute of Energy, and the Australian Nuclear Association, which is organised in a four-year rotation by one of these organisations
4. The Ideas@theHouse series of lectures, jointly hosted by our Patron, the Governor of NSW, and the Society — typically held three times a year at Government House, Sydney
5. The lunchtime Provocations and Inspirations series of lectures, which is held 4–5 times a year at the Union University and Schools Club
6. The annual Royal Society of NSW and Learned Academies Forum, which is a one-day event comprising lectures and panel sessions, hosted at Government House, Sydney, typically in the first week of November each year.

In addition, there are lectures organised by other organisations with which the Society is a joint sponsor. These include the annual Frontiers of Science Forum (held in March and organised by the Teachers Guild of NSW) and the annual joint event of the Australian Institute of Physics, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, ANSTO and the Society, usually organised by ANSTO and the AIP.

Of these six classes of events, the Sydney Program Committee is responsible for the OGMs (1), the visits program (2), and the Four Societies Annual Meeting (3) every four years.

The main focus of the Sydney Program Committee is the design, coordination, and delivery of the lectures and presentations at the Ordinary General Meetings, which are intended to be:

• Informative and interesting to a broad audience of Society members, guests, and a wide online audience, which is reached through our YouTube channel and promoted by social media
• Consistent with the Society’s mission of providing Society members and the public with authentic and authoritative information
• Promote scholarship and research in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts, consistent with the Society’s mission
• Reflective of the breadth and diversity of the NSW intellectual community
• Suitably balanced amongst the disciplines and fields in which the Society operates, and mindful of the expectation of Society’s principal sponsor, the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer, of sufficient science/technology/engineering content
• Cognisant of our substantial online audience through YouTube, in raising our outreach profile
• Operate efficiently and effectively within the available resources (which includes costs associated with the physical hosting of events and their recording)
• Supportive of member engagement and public outreach.

Detailed information about the Committee’s Terms of Reference is available from the preceding link.

Composition

The composition of the Events Committee in 2026–2027 is listed in the table below.

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