XBRL international conference

XBRL is a language based on XML, used in the submission of financial information. Every six months an international conference takes place, and this week Madrid has hosted the latest Edition. As part of my work is related to XBRL and given the fact that I cannot claim any travel expenses, I've been sent there these days. That's all I'll say about XBRL (for further information: www.xbrl.org), but here are some remarks on what I've lived.

First thing to say, it's that my first impression about XBRL, four years ago, was that it was more a dream than a reality. And currently it's used in many countries and I'm even one of the experts on the matter... I'm an economist among an army of IT people, who I don't usually fully understand.

This kind of meeting is a good opportunity to be face-to-face with colleagues that I only know from e-mail. I also see some other colleagues, which I really appreciate, like Masatomo Goto from Japan, the Polish mafia (Maciej and company), some Germans or Charlie Hoffman from the USA.

But as everything in life, international conferences also have their drawbacks. Sometimes, I have the impression that they're the perfect excuse for spending a week abroad, in a luxury hotel and with a corporate credit card. Today, Friday, work was scheduled until five pm in the afternoon. I've only met about 20 colleagues, most of them dressed in a casual way (somebody even with bermudas) and work has finished at 11 am in the morning. So, all this work is just for some top guys to have a nice time in Spain, in Japan or wherever? Come on, start working. Now, I understand why they're always smiling and happy... I know that's how things work, but I don't like it very much.

Also when being in presentations, some executive people (yuppies in Spanish) were more worried in playing with their laptop and in surfing into Internet than in listening to the speaker. From my point of view, that's really rude and not expected from such well-paid people. I wouldn't like my audience to behave so. Besides, it seems that if you don't have a laptop with you, you're not important enough...

More things. These kind of events are an advanced course on English accents. From the Japanese one to the German, every accent is present. Some of us, Spaniards, face huge difficulties in speaking English, but I think that everybody catchs our messages.

Japanese desserve a paragraph for themselves since they're the masters. They're the best people in working with XBRL but they don't share much of their knowledge. Then, you attend to one of their presentations and you're surprised about what they do, because it's something we don't even dream now in Spain. A funny thing about Japanese is that when the speaker is Japanese, some colleagues take photos of them with their mini digital cameras...

Also international conferences like this one have a hidden conference in them, with secret meetings in hotel rooms and so on. But I won't write more about it, as I don't want to get into problems. But I can talk about my support to some presentations, meaning by "support" my complete disposition in order to "persuade" people making too many questions not to repeat that next time, after a signal by the speaker (in a mafia way, like I've seen in many films).

Next conference will be in Philadelphia. My chances of being allowed to attend to it are statistically equal to zero, unfortunately.