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“All of us saw an opportunity to do good for the world,” said Eric Cohen, of a small group of idealists during the height of Enron’s collapse and WorldCom scandal. The 10-year history of the development of XBRL as a way to improve the accuracy, transparency, and sharing of business information is newly encapsulated in a publication by the AIPCA. “It’s my personal belief that this attempt to give a gift to the world is the reason XBRL is today the global standard for business reporting,” says Cohen.

The article is based on a chronicle by Charlie Hoffman, “the father of XBRL” and fellow founding member Louis Matherne. It includes lively interviews with XBRL personalities, many of whom say Hoffman, “were like me: opinioned, driven, autocratic, ‘get it done now’ type of people. They were aggressive competitors in their day jobs, but to accomplish their goal of improved business reporting, they had to force themselves to become tight collaborators. The idea of open data sharing demanded that they start with themselves. They had to collaborate and reach consensus. And they had to keep on agreeing to agree. In fact, the whole world would have to agree to agree.

It has.

Today the XBRL International is a consortium of over 550 organizations and XBRL is used for business reporting by all the major stock exchanges, by various government agencies, by central banks, and by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (EDGAR Online is proud to have been part of that journey from the beginning.)

The article is titled The story of our new language; Personalities, cultures, and politics combine to create a common, global language for business and can be downloaded here, though the AICPA is also publishing a limited number of hard copies.