In the spirit of good governance technology is giving powerful tools to citizens in Thailand. Instead of, putting your faith in politicians and bureaucrats and hope for the best, Citizens should be able to access real time data from the MOF. To do this lobby the IMF of which Thailand is a member to require all financial data to have XBRL bar-coded tags. XBRL extensible Business Reporting Language it assigns a bar-code to each number so that numbers are not just dumb text on a page hidden among millions of pages. Interactive data visualization tools allow citizens to not only look at data in their country but also compare data to other countries such as Lao or Vietnam. By creating standard data tags no longer can the institution just list government expense as one large category. Imagine instead of seeing expense, data could be drilled down to see exactly how much the trip to Myanmar cost or what the meal cost to cook for visiting Heads of State in a second. Imagine what this would do to accountability and transparency

Take a look at what a few clicks can do at the IMF Data Mapper interactive data visualization tools can do in a few seconds. I chose Thailand and her neighbors and added data points for GDP per capita, population, inflation and current account data points forecasted out to 2013.

IMF Data Mapper interactive data visualization tool from the World Economic Outlook Database.

You may be thinking this is not new and you are right it was invented by Charles Hoffman 10 years ago. Since then most of Europe and even China requires Company Data to be submitted by XBRL in order to be listed on their stock exchanges. Citizens are given the power in finding the next Enron scandal. Industry already bar-code their products and use radio control identification it is time for the financials to do so.

What is the problem is that the powers that be do not like citizens having this information. The main one is the United States who keeps promising it will comply by 2010. Currently only Wall Street insiders and hedge funds are able to purchase interactive software for several thousands of dollars from such providers as Thomson Reuters but even their data points are limited to just 200 to 400 data points. This technology gives more powerful data to the individual investors for free leveling the playing field with large fund managers. Imagine with this technology’s increase in data points individual investors in Thailand could actually turn the current Mickey Mouse stock exchange in Thailand into a truly regional Stock Exchange with confidence.

Of course the powers that be still have not given up the SEC in America will allow US companies to invent their own tags to fit a square peg in a round hole to help companies spin their numbers and the SEC is not going to audit the companies to verify their tags are accurate. Dangers that citizens face in these efforts are clear in the criticism of the IMF in not forecasting the current sub-prime mess in America but that was because unlike Thailand that the IMF requires surveillance and compliance the US does not allow the IMF to surveillance the US. Thus the whole world was caught off guard. One year ago the US, Britain and Japan were the only countries still refusing to regulate for disclosure by hedge funds for obvious reasons.

The technology for citizens to perform their own accountability analysis is here. Privatization of State Enterprises does not have to be done on Nepotism and Cronyism by politicians. Citizens in Spain even help the government track money laundering would that be helpful in Thailand including diplomatic pouches?

We are protesting the wrong people to ask for change protesting world institutions and world standards organizations for country compliance would be much more effective. We already know that protesting the powers that are do not change anything locally. In every wrong-doing following the money allows the citizens to benefit from good governance instead of the few.