Open sourcing geological data through corporate proxy voting... : mining

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-07

Summary:

"Many of you will know of 'The Goldcorp Challenge' around the year 2000, when when a Canadian gold mining company decided to upload all their proprietary geological data to the Internet for all to see. The idea was that open-sourcing the interpretation of their geological data would lead to novel theories on where to drill next. The experiment was a major success for the company and it received proposals from many different disciplines. The proposals ended up finding a great deal of gold that boosted the company's market cap from ~100 million to $9 billion. It's a very interesting story. Years later, the mining industry is still very conservative and very secretive in its business practices. Despite the success of the open source model, it has failed to take root in the industry, which leads me to suppose that perhaps the change will come from shareholders pushing for management to open source the company data. If this model were implemented widely, it would cut costs dramatically in the industry, which as we know is in the depths of a cyclical bear market. I don't know much about proxy voting, so I have to ask: could investors bundle together their votes to encourage management to open source their geological data? I know how difficult it might be to get enough shareholders to force management to do anything, but if enough shareholders were involved, it would still send a clear message and give management the courage to put their necks on the line."

Link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mining/comments/4di2p4/open_sourcing_geological_data_through_corporate/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.geo oa.geodata oa.data oa.industries

Date tagged:

04/07/2016, 09:19

Date published:

04/07/2016, 05:19