Bob Schneider is a Partner in 
Wilson So is the Director of Hitachi America, Ltd. Presentations from the XBRL Munich Conference
Written by Bob Schneider Posted on June 22, 2007
The 15th International XBRL Conference was held in Munich, Germany, from June 4 to 7. The plenary session on June 4 was conducted entirely in English and a symposium in German took place on the fifth; there were also numerous track sessions on international adoption, external reporting, taxonomy development, and other important XBRL topics.
For this American who did not attend the conference, listening to the presentations now available online was a mixed bag (more about downloading them in a moment). It’s extremely useful to be reminded that, while the acronyms in my world prominently include FASB, DJIA, and FDIC, there’s a parallel universe across the Atlantic where the talk is of IASB, IBEX, and CEBS. In addition, as someone who has given short talks in broken, poorly articulated Japanese to small groups of puzzled faces, I can only imagine how challenging it must be for those born on the Continent to give a major address to a huge audience in English.
But as unfair and as unsympathetic as it may sound, I have to say that listening to some of the drier presentations in heavily accented, stilted English can be a challenge itself. Moreover, the logistics of finding and downloading the speeches are tortuous. I hope someone will post a comment that shows I’m wrong and simplifies the following directions.
First, go to the XBRL.org Latest News page. In the middle of the page you will see the links to the audio recordings for the various first-day speeches — PD-01, PD-02, etc. These are big files of up to 25MBs and, as the site suggests, I downloaded them first to my hard drive rather than open them directly online.
What about the visuals? The slides are stored separately in the Munich conference’s public session page. Scroll down to the presentation (PD-01, PD-02, etc.) for the matching PDF file of slides. Open the audio file in your media player, open the PDF in Adobe Reader, and enjoy.
Unfortunately, for a number of important presentations, there are no slides. Most notably, in her speech SEC Commissioner Kathleen Casey apparently gave demonstrations of the Interactive Financial Report Viewer, mutual fund risk/return summary in XBRL, and, most interestingly, the new executive compensation viewer. You can read her speech online or download the audio (PD-04), but I couldn’t find any visuals.
They’re also not available for the talk of John Turner, Chair of the XBRL International Standards Board, which focuses on the various XBRL working groups for formulas, versioning, XBRL-GL, etc. The talk is still well worth listening to (it begins at about 11 minutes into PD-03), but slides would be helpful.
Similarly, I was eager to view the presentation of Tadashi Shiozaki of Takara Printing. In introducing him to the audience, Walter Hamscher said he was highly impressed by the talk (PD-15). Japan’s Financial Services Agency will require XBRL statements by fiscal 2008, and Mr. Shiozaki’s discussion centers on a user-friendly application for preparing such statements for those who don’t know XBRL. Although there is a link for the slides on the public session page, I was unable to download them on either of my machines (perhaps you’ll have better luck).
Happily, both audio and visuals are available for the talk of Mr. Sebastian Muriel, President of XBRL Spain (PD-06). As I have noted, Spain is at the forefront of the XBRL movement. Indeed, it is constantly seeking out new frontiers, both geographic (Latin America) and functional (local government, SMEs), for the XBRL effort. Mr. Muriel’s discussion demonstrates just how broad and deep the potential for interactive data is.
I especially enjoyed the talk of Robert Garnett (PD-07), a Board Member of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and Chairman of the International Financial Reporting Interpretations Committee (IFRIC). Mr. Garnett has a dry sense of humor, and his talk on the implementation of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is both highly informative and amusing. His presentation is by no means limited to XBRL, and it’s well worth the time of anyone interested in international financial reporting.
Finally, Eric Cohen gives an excellent overview of the Global XBRL Academic Competition (PD-14). Every intellectual endeavor, especially one as intricate as XBRL, needs to foster the creativity and imagination of young people doing research in the field. To some extent, the great slides that accompany this talk which are filled with useful links offset the lack of visuals for other speeches. I hope downloading the speeches of future conferences is made easier, so that those not fortunate enough to attend them can easily access the presentations online.