Open Risk Manual

The Motivation

Risk Management is a vast and ever expanding domain of knowledge. The required skills are of an applied nature, occasionally ery technical and certainly ever-changing. This specialized nature of the knowledge base is not served fully by either the traditional academic literature or classic publications in printed book form.

Wikipedia comes frequently to the rescue of risk managers (and will likely continue to do so!), but there is a clear need for a more specialized, open, and collaborative wiki that focuses on risk management. With this motivation, Open Risk developed and supports the Open Risk Manual, an open and public wiki dedicated to risk management.

The Manual is primarily a technical resource, constructed by and for professional risk managers. Yet the Manual is open to anybody interested in understanding this important knowledge domain. The scope of the knowledge base is not fixed precisely. It spans the range of risk management practice, including financial risk management and more specialized quantitative approaches.

The Principle

The development of the Open Risk Manual follows roughly the same principles as Wikipedia. Namely it is:

• based on voluntary contributions by individuals willing to spend their own time to provide a quality entry that will be of use to every risk manager, anywhere, anytime
• released under a Creative Commons license

Some key differences with how Wikipedia works

• the Open Risk Manual requires approved Author registration before one can add-to or edit the Manual. This restriction serves multiple purposes, ranging from simplifying website security to enabling a more consistent outcome
• The objective and style of the Manual is that of a Technical Manual, not an Encyclopedia or a Textbook. This choice is reflected among others in the fact that
  • Articles are structured for easy problem solving, not academic learnin
  • The focus is more on tools than theory
  • There is no particular effort for bibliographic completeness - the Risk Manual is not the place to establish academic precedence!

The Development Plan

The Risk Manual is still in the build-out phase. This means:

• We at Open Risk have kick-started the development with a set of initial articles and place-holders
• Contributors may join and adopt areas for development / improvement
• Users respond with requests and feedback
• The process is iterated ad-infinitum

Learn more and get involved

• You can read more about the types of resources included in the Manual here.