Intelligence management for serious teams.

This investigation dives into the high-stakes political chess game between the United States and Iran centered on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that carries nearly 20% of the world's oil supply. Your goal is to map out exactly how political decisions, alliances, leadership statements, and diplomatic maneuvers are driving (or trying to defuse) the conflict right now.

You Are Looking For

Official policy positions from the White House, U.S. State Department, Iranian Supreme Leader's office, and Iran's Foreign Ministry on freedom of navigation and control of the Strait.

Recent diplomatic cables, summit outcomes, or back-channel talks involving the U.S., Iran, Gulf Cooperation Council states, China, Russia, or the United Nations.

Political leverage points such as sanctions packages, nuclear-deal revival attempts, election-year rhetoric in the U.S., or hardline shifts inside Iran's regime.

Any public or leaked statements from senior officials that reveal red lines, threats, or de-escalation offers tied specifically to the Strait of Hormuz.

Key Questions the Investigation Must Answer

What are the core political grievances each side claims are at stake in the Strait — regime survival, regional dominance, energy security, or something else?

How have changes in U.S. or Iranian leadership (or upcoming elections) shifted the political temperature around the waterway?

Which international alliances or rivalries are actively shaping the conflict; for example, Iran's ties with Russia and China versus the U.S. security partnerships with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE?

Mw 7.4 San Jose Del Palmar Earthquake — Cascading Humanitarian, Governance, and Strategic Stability Implications for Colombia's Chocó Department and Andean-Pacific Corridor

🔑 The Ask

A massive earthquake hit western Colombia on 10 August, three days into a brand-new president's term. As of this update, 265 people are confirmed dead, 3,500+ are injured, and roughly 500 remain officially missing, though that missing number has swung wildly (crowd-sourced counts ran as high as ~4,000 in the first two days) as records get sorted out. Search-and-rescue is now officially over; the response is shifting into recovery and rebuilding.

The three things that matter most from here:

Money is flowing, the job now is tracking delivery, not pledges. Countries and multilateral institutions have pledged roughly $1.3 billion combined, dwarfing the US's initial $15.5 million. The open question isn't "will enough money show up", it's whether pledged money actually gets delivered and spent where it's needed.

Chocó's security vacuum is the main medium-term risk. The hardest-hit area is also an established drug-trafficking corridor with thin state presence. While security forces stay tied up on rescue and curfew duty elsewhere, armed groups already active there have room to move in. This is the single most important thing to keep watching over the coming months.

The new government is being tested on coordination, not just capacity. A leadership change at the national disaster agency mid-crisis, and public accusations that aid was being accepted or declined along political lines, both point to a government still finding its footing. Neither is disqualifying on its own, but both are worth tracking closely.

The actual to-do list:

Track how the ~$1.3B in pledges converts into delivered, spent assistance, that conversion rate is the real test

Watch Chocó specifically for early signs of armed groups moving into the post-quake vacuum

Competition Boundaries

Sources

The ultimate objective for the competitor is to transform a complex web of raw data into a cohesive intelligence product. To encourage rigor and strategic thinking, the following expectations apply:

Analysts must choose up to three (3) PESTLEM categories (e.g., Political, Economic, and Military) to report on.

You are not required to submit three reports; however, you will be scored based on the quality and depth of the analysis within your chosen categories.

The competition is designed to reward insight over volume. A single, deeply researched report that successfully identifies a "market-shift indicator" will outscore a larger volume of low-context sources or multiple shallow reports.

Reports

Each report acts as the "capstone" for its respective PESTLEM tag. A successful report must:

Synthesize Multiple Nodes: Don't just restate your sources; explain how the connections between them prove a larger geopolitical trend.

Address the "So What?": Every report must directly answer how the localised events in Bari (the "Military" or "Social" triggers) impact the broader "Economic" or "Political" stability of the organizations.

Situation

Missing-persons hackathons traditionally run as capture-the-flag point races: whoever submits the most pieces of information wins. Volume is easy to score — but volume is not what helps the people who inherit the work. A pile of raw finds without structure or verification can cost a case manager more time than it saves.

The 2024 National Missing Persons Hackathon set out to invert that. For its scale — more than a thousand analysts, case managers, industry leaders, and partners across Australia — it needed a platform that could make quality the thing being scored.

Deployment

Newrali was selected as the platform of choice over alternatives, and worked with the organizers to develop the event's new format: quality over quantity, with the report mattering more than the individual source. The platform ran self-hosted on Australian infrastructure, fully managed by Newrali — keeping the operation and its data in-country and meeting the event's privacy requirements end to end. The operation ran across a week, with the national day on 13 September 2024 connecting seven cities — Sydney as headquarters, live-streamed nationwide.

Teams worked six real missing-person cases. Every piece of information entered through structured intake as a submitted flag; Case Managers assigned to each case verified submissions before they counted; and each team's final deliverable was a structured information report, scored on its quality — not just the volume of flags behind it.

Outcome

The event closed with collated, source-attributed information reports across all six cases, handed to the relevant State and Territory police — with the provenance of every accepted lead intact for the follow-up work that continues after the event ends. The new format proved itself: the quality-first structure held at a thousand participants, and the reports were the product.

What made the difference

Making quality scoreable. A points race rewards whatever the platform can count — so the platform has to be able to count the right thing. Structured intake, per-case verification lanes, and a report studio meant the format could reward verified, well-argued reporting over raw volume, and a thousand contributors' energy arrived at the police as evidence someone can act on.