Using Crowdsourcing to Locate Mining Drill Sites
During this quarter Australian based mining company OZ Minerals will start drilling at a new site, based on a three-month crowdsourcing campaign.
Earlier this year the miner offered up project data and an Australian $1 million (US $688,000) prize pool.
The purpose of the crowdsourcing campaign was to attract fresh insights as to where the most promising exploration targets near its flagship Prominent Hill copper-gold mine might be.
Access to Big Data
More than 1,000 participants from 62 countries took part and were given access to more than six terabytes of public and private exploration data, such as drill hole and seismic surveys.
“These are some very smart people from all sort of backgrounds, atypical backgrounds for the mining industry,” said Andrew Cole, the OZ Minerals Chief Executive.
“Some of those groups have come up with very different, quite remarkable ways of thinking and interpreting data.”
One of the principal benefits of engaging the crowd in this way is that it can speed up the lengthy mineral exploration process.
Crowdsourcing Success
The top three teams who shared the prize money were based in Australia and Singapore. Following the crowdsourcing initiative, some of the teams formed their own companies and won contracts with OZ Minerals.
The Australian company is also engaging with crowdsourcing in other ways, such as consulting employees to come with new ideas for improving working conditions.
To discover more about how OZ Minerals leveraged data and worked with the crowd to discover new mine exploration sites, click here.
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