During the 22nd XBRL International Conference in Brussels, Belgium from May 17-19, 2011, I had the privilege of speaking on how a CLOUD-enabled Internet could propel the advance of XBRL even further. At the conference, the inaugural issue of Interactive Business Reporting magazine was available. After speaking with its editors, I had the privilege of “penning” an article for Issue 2 (page 38). The first two paragraphs from the article frame the rest of the thinking:
For the past several centuries, we have organized our world of knowledge on paper. During SWIFT’s annual global financial conference, Sibos, in Amsterdam in October 2010, I reflected on how this world of paper leads to a shape of finance and the implications of the ‘cloud’ on the way we perceive money. During XBRL22 in Brussels this past May, I began to ask the same question about our financial reports and whether they, too, are ‘shaped’ by the way in which we organize our world of information. Is the full promise of interactive business reporting being held back by a similar ‘physical geography of knowledge?”