The real magic is the community process

At the beginning of 2008 PillarOne startet as a project and last week, 15 months later, 70 participants gathered for the first PillarOne conference.

Was it an actuarial conference - no.        Was it an IT/software conference - no.

It was the conference of the PillarOne community which is concerned with risk management. People with different backgrounds have something to say about risk management: Actuaries, economists, auditors, regulators, software specialists, academics. Some came from small actuarial consulting practices, others represented large insurance companies or software firms.

Inevitably, the question was raised whether there exist measures to safeguard the insurance industry from such a colossal failure of the risk management profession as it happened in the banking industry.

Paul Sharma's (FSA) statement that more diversity and transparency is needed to protect against such failures resonated well with the audience.

Diversity and transparency are fundamental values of an open source community.

-- Markus

PS: If you missed the conference, you can soon watch the video streams of the conference sessions on this site.