As part of its ongoing commitment to frugal corporate and technical innovation, Sub-Economic Resources NL (ASX Code SUE) is set to undertake the company’s inaugural ‘Exploration Hackathon’ over the coming May Day long weekend.

SUE will enrich hackathon participants, anticipated to comprise recent unemployed geoscience graduates and would-be technology entrepreneurs, with a number of real-world challenges facing the company.

Challenges are rumoured to include ‘smarter’ soil sampling, ‘cleaner’ sample preparation, ‘error-free’ database entry, ‘cheaper’ exploration rehabilitation, ‘faster’ office filing, lower data requirement resource estimations, ‘double-sided’ toner-free photocopying and even ‘high-resolution, compressed-file’ document scanning.

Participants will have access to SUE’s unique exploration datasets provided by the GSWA and a highly valuable 1956 version of a monograph on ‘Australian Ore Deposits’ kindly donated by our Head of Exploration. Participants will have the opportunity to analyse and solve these exciting challenges in a real-time, fast-paced, collaborative working environment.

SUE chief information officer, Eliza Doolittle, said the company saw huge potential from using young, energetic and enthusiastic graduates and volunteers who will work continuously throughout a 72-hour long weekend for the pure fun and challenge of it.

“This is our first hackathon and we are relishing the chance to embrace the efforts and collective intellectual property of young tech-heads in a far nimbler way than our larger company competitors who have been doing it for years” said Doolittle. Non-executive director and rehabilitation expert – Alfred Doolittle said: “Why we didn’t think of this years ago, I don’t know:  It is not like SUE to look a gift horse in the mouth – so we are determined to be fast-followers into the work-for-fun hackathon market”.

“SUE is 100% committed to contributing to our own corporate development using the graciously provided hard work of others and to fully harnessing the potential of the next generation technology and science community across Australia: We hope to identify more people who will work for us for the personal challenge – and the shot at a substantive prize - through the course of this inaugural event.”

Teams will have the opportunity to be mentored by our industry veterans, fast-talking corporate advisors, self-proclaimed exploration experts and also by SUE’s existing short-term, award-based, contract workers. SUE ‘Head of Exploration’ Professor Higgins said he was “particularly looking forward to learning how to use a computer from these tech savvy youngsters. In particular, he would like to investigate the use of Netflix for minerals exploration.”

A first-prize of ten million, short-dated, at-the-money, SUE options, with a value estimated at $200,000, will be awarded for the winning ‘work-smart’ solutions, thus raising valuable working capital for SUE as option conversion is mandatory within 14 days of their grant.  Second-prize will be the opportunity to prepare an inferred resource estimate for one of the Sub-Economic Resources NL promising lithium, cobalt, scandium, graphite, helium or technetium projects.  

SUE Chairman Paul Kingsley said he was “looking forward to dropping in at the company’s facilities to personally meet and greet the hackathon participants and welcome their valuable contributions.”  He hoped they would be able to benefit from meeting a person of stature.

The weekend’s hackathon activities will culminate in a BYO ‘all-you-can-eat’ barbeque on the Monday evening.

Those wishing to participate in the inaugural ‘SUE Exploration Hackathon’ are encouraged to contact Eliza Doolitte via post immediately (PO Box X267Y, West Perth, WA 6872) – and to also provide their personal banking details in anticipation of the allocation of prizes.

Good Hunting

Strictly Boardroom holds no shares in Sub-Economic Resources NL