Applying Open Source Ideas to Mineral Exploration

A friend sent me this link to a June 2002 Fast Company article about the Red Lake mine in in northwestern Ontario.

Briefly, the article describes how the owners of an underperforming gold mine put all of their internal data on the net and ran a contest to the world’s academic geologists, challenging them to find the gold. There were many high-quality entrants. The winners got cash prizes of several hundred thousand dollars; the mine has drilled for gold and found it.

I wrote back to my friend and said “that’s a great story; it’s a pity that it’s more than a year old, otherwise I would blog it.”

Then I realized — why not? It’s still a good story.