Powering Australia's National Missing Persons Hackathon

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.