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Untapped Energy: A Community Growing Quietly Alongside Calgary’s Energy Transition
From the outside, it is not always obvious when something meaningful is forming, because it rarely arrives with a clear announcement or a single defining moment. It tends to emerge gradually through repeated gatherings, shared interests, and a growing sense among participants that something useful is taking shape.
That is largely how Untapped Energy presents itself today.
For those already connected to Calgary’s data and energy communities, it has become an increasingly familiar presence, evolving to meet the needs of these professionals.
Practical Beginnings
Untapped Energy traces back to 2018, when a group of oil and gas professionals began exploring how data analytics and data science might intersect with their existing work, not as a theoretical exercise but as a practical question tied to their day-to-day roles and long-term relevance.
Rather than attempting to build a formal program from the outset, they looked for an existing format that could bring people together around real problems, which led them to organizing “datathons” as a way to create short, intensive, and collaborative learning events.
They organized the very first Datathon for the Oil and Gas sector, hosted at Bow Valley College, where more than 120 professionals participated over the course of a single weekend, committing their time to working with unfamiliar datasets and tools in a setting that was, for many, outside the structure of their usual professional environment.
From an outside perspective, what stands out about that moment is less the number of attendees and more what it revealed: that there was already a meaningful level of interest in applying data within the energy sector, even if it had not yet been organized into a sustained or visible community.
From Isolated Events to Something Ongoing
Maintaining the momentum after that first event, the organizers continued to host meetups, gradually establishing a rhythm of activity that allowed participants to stay engaged over time and to build familiarity not only with the subject matter but also with one another.
Over time, this consistency shaped the community, since communities are rarely built through singular moments of intensity but instead through repeated interaction and incremental trust.
As participation expanded, Untapped Energy also broadened its scope, introducing larger datathons, developing partnerships with other organizations across Calgary’s technology ecosystem, and gradually extending its reach beyond its original base of participants.
By 2022, it formalized as a federally registered non-profit, a step that, from an outside perspective, signals a transition from an informal initiative into something more structured and capable of sustaining long-term activity.
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