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Hmm. Could Iceland be ideal test for “Democratizing Data” concepts?
By WDavidStephenson | July 10, 2011
I just got back from a delightful 17-day European vacation (marred only by the theft of my brand-new iPad from a hypothetically “locked” compartment on the overnight Paris-Venice train, while we were sleeping in it [how creepy is that?]. According to the Venice cops, this happens EVERY night: so why don’t they crack down on the theft ring, which I’m convinced includes the train conductors? Your guess is as good as mine. Don’t even THINK of taking that particular train!).
But I digress….
We ended the trip in Iceland, which certainly seems to have been chastened by its out-of-control banking excesses during the height of the global mortgage binge of the last decade. Equally impressive, as one of the most computer-savvy nations on earth, it is gaining attention for crowd-sourcing its new constitution.
That got me thinking that Iceland might be an ideal test bed for the concepts I outline in Data Dynamite:
- the country’s commercial banks were so thoroughly disgraced during the banking crisis that I suspect nothing they can say will re-assure the public: the only way they can earn public support and confidence is through a “don’t trust us, track us” approach in which they are utterly transparent in their practices, using an XBRL-based operating system in which documentation for any loans (with appropriate safeguards for privacy and security) would be released on a real-time basis. This would both be a safeguard against internal practices that put the bank at risk and would allow regulators to quickly intervene to avoid further problems.
- There’s debate within Iceland about how to exploit the country’s tremendous geothermal energy supplies. An XBRL GL-based internal reporting system would be ideal for managing a resource that is as dynamic as geothermal and would benefit from the ability to price the supply and monitor maintenance issues on a real-time basis.Requiring that any geothermal operation use XBRL to report to the government as well would be a simple extension of an internal XBRL GL reporting system, and could result in the kind of “Regulation 3.0″ system that I’ve described before.
Iceland is small enough, and has a small enough private sector that I think it would be relatively easy for them to implement such a system. Hey, Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, gimme a call!
Topics: open government, XBRL, data dynamite, open data, policy and politics, technology, e-gov transformation | |
