TECHNOLOGY
skills that they need to bring business forward ,” he says .
Last year , Unearthed rolled out nine hackathons , both locally across Australia and internationally in Cape Town and San Francisco . This year will see a series of hackathons covering Toronto , Melbourne , Buenos Aires , Houston , Brisbane , Perth and a return to Cape Town once more .
The choice of location is a deliberate one , as the company responds to the way in which the cost of learning technology skills is significantly reducing in the modern world .
“ Anyone with an internet connection can open a browser and learn how to be a data scientist these days ,” he says .
“ This means that the best people for solving these problems can be anywhere in the world .”
Another means of discovering and tapping into the international pool of talent is through a series of online competitions that run alongside the hackathons . Where the hackathons are about exploring the opportunities and possibilities in the challenge , the online competitions are driven by knowing the company ’ s desired result .
Competitions such as Phase-X , in which Unearthed partnered
with BHP Billiton to find the best teams of university students and research organisations worldwide to create a superior algorithm for optimising open pit mining phases . “ The power of that approach is that we can put that distributed talent to work in competitive processes to achieve the best result ,” says Strharsky .
Through these competitions , companies such as BHP and other major players can connect with people with the necessary skillsets to solve their biggest challenges in what Strharsky calls a
24 June 2017