XBRL

= transparent financial reporting format; the eXtensible Business Reporting Language is a data standard for financial reporting, most commonly used to cover accounting information.

URL = http://www.xbrl.org/

Description

"a standard format for structuring and tagging data so that it can be readily understood, and easily shared. Charlie Hoffman, the originator of XBRL, says that it allows anyone to be a financial analyst. This amounts to what Roth terms a new `philosophy of regulation', since it imposes a standard structure rather than seeking to deal with all and every possible - and impossible - detail of what might happen in the future. This neatly evades the issue of adding still further levels of regulation to an already unworkable and highly ineffective system of national and international controls. Just as the internet, with its TCP/IP and other protocols, enforces a certain level of structure and sharing on anyone and everyone who wishes to participate, so too can XBRL establish a basis for genuine participation and a platform for Linus' law in the context of global finance.

Mutuality 2.0; a new form of financial system that offers mutuality in the old sense of the term, together with feasible opportunities for participation and supervision, but avoiding further layers of regulation, or further levels of hierarchical control. The idea of XBRL is that it is not a set of regulations, it is a standard reporting format, so to an extent it is similar to Linux and Wikipedia; the content has to conform to a format, but there is plenty of room to manoeuvre for the content itself, with any such flexibility being open to be monitored by anyone and everyone. Just as Google and Wikipedia, for different reasons and in different ways, enforce their respective protocols, so too could financial systems be established that enforce reporting and recording of transactions along similar lines. Open Source "regulation" has started already, with projects like FreeRisk. The adoption of XBRL reporting together with open source projects to monitor financial information would also help counter the raging distrust that is now so widespread. Financial institutions could refuse to conform to the XBRL standard, but would be judged accordingly." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/mutuality-2-0-open-source-the-financial-crisis)

Discussion

Tony Bryant:

"This mix of bottom-up, voluntary participation coupled with a common format or standard is now available for monitoring the financial system in the form of XBRL.

XBRL [1] operates on a basis similar to that of HTML [2] and XML [3]; each one outlines a standard format for structuring and tagging data so that it can be readily understood, and easily shared. Charlie Hoffman, the originator of XBRL, says that it allows anyone to be a financial analyst. This amounts to what Roth terms a new ‘philosophy of regulation’, since it imposes a standard structure rather than seeking to deal with all and every possible – and impossible – detail of what might happen in the future. This neatly evades the issue of adding still further levels of regulation to an already unworkable and highly ineffective system of national and international controls. Just as the internet, with its TCP/IP and other protocols, enforces a certain level of structure and sharing on anyone and everyone who wishes to participate, so too can XBRL establish a basis for genuine participation and a platform for Linus’ law in the context of global finance.

Provided the reporting of financial data has a medium at least as good as the Internet, and is presented in a format such as XBRL, many heads are inevitably better than one. But of course this will not be of any use unless there is also a critical mass of people who are interested in analyzing the data.

The experience of Wikipedia and Open Source in general indicates that a critical mass can and will emerge; moreover given the heightened interest in all things financial, it is likely that there will be more than sufficient eyeballs willing and able to turn towards scrutiny of such a system.

This is a basis for ‘Radical Transparency’." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/files/mutuality.pdf)