Established in 2017, Upstream Hackathon is a 2.5 day competition targeting young Saudi Aramco professionals collaborating in teams to solve real upstream challenges. In this competition, young professionals from different departments will get a chance to work in cross-disciplinary teams and get exposure to a wide range of fields of Upstream. This event promotes knowledge sharing, technical skills development, and networking between young professionals. At the end of the competition, a winning team will be awarded with exciting and valuable prizes. The event is composed of three different stages: challenges, hacking, and solutions.
The first stage takes place during the morning of the first day. During this stage, each participating department will present one challenge by a subject matter experts to all participants. Following the challenge presentations, the participants will get to interact with the subject matter experts to ask any question or inquire further about existing solutions. Then, each participant will sign up for one challenge to work on. Finally, the organizing committee will form teams of people with a shared targeted challenge. Each team will have up to five members and be as diverse as possible in terms of backgrounds and skills.
The second stage takes placed between the afternoon of the first day until the end of the second day. During this stage, each team will tackle its selected challenge and will attempt to come up with creative and practical solutions. During this stage, the participants are free to work at their preferred location. Towards the end, each team will prepare a short presentation with their solutions and results.
The third stage takes place during the morning of the last day. During this stage, each participating team will present their solutions to the panel of judges and subject matter experts. The judges (SMEs) will score each solution based on its creativity,novelty and practicality. Once all scores are recorded, the winning team will be announced and rewarded.
Each department participates with one real challenge that it is currently facing. The challenge should target young professionals of all upstream departments without requiring extensive knowledge and expertise of a specific topic. A good challenge needs to be:
Each judge will evaluate each team based on their presented solution during the third stage of the event. The scoring criteria are: 25% on creativity, 25% on presentation skills, timing and slide quality, and 50% on the validity and practicality of the idea.
Each participating department nominates up to 2 subject matter experts to play two important roles. During the first stage, the experts will present their departments’ challenge to the participants and provide any necessary information/data. During the last stage, the experts from all the departments will serve in the judging panel to evaluate all the teams’ solutions. Each expert is required to attend the first and third stages of the event. Additionally, the experts must be reachable during the second stage to answer any questions or provide any data necessary to the hackers.
Each participating departing nominates up to 7 young professionals to participate as hackers. The participants must be 35 years old or younger and are interested to learn and tackle problems from different fields. The participants must be present and fully engaged throughout all stages of the event. Each participant is expected to meaningfully contribute to the final team presentation.
