Earth Day was founded in 1970 as a day of education about environmental issues, and Earth Day 2021 occurs on Thursday, April 22 - the holiday's 51st anniversary. On Earth Day 2020, over 100 million people around the world observed the 50th anniversary in what is being referred to as the largest online mass mobilization in history. The Earth Day 2021 theme is Restore Our Earth.

Celebrating this special occasion, we are today releasing a new tool towards Sustainable Finance. Equinox is an open source platform that supports risk management and reporting of Project Finance. The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards from EBA, PCAF and Equator Principles to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios of project finance investments.

If you are interested to learn more about Equinox and sustainability in the context of Project Finance, the blog post explains more about the motivation and current functionality

The source code is as always in the usual place

Enjoy!

The week of March 22 to 28 is Global Money Week. Global Money Week (GMW) in an international effort aimed at improving financial literacy of young people. The ultimate goal of the Campaign is to ensure that all children and youth have access to high-quality financial education, they learn about money matters and are able to take smart financial decisions that can improve their future financial resilience and financial well-being.

Take care of yourself, take care of your money is the official theme of Global Money Week 2021. Open Risk is happy to join the effort towards greater financial literacy and the Open Risk Academy is one of our most important tools in this direction.

What is money? After thousands of years philosophers and economists still debate about it and there are various theories of why it exists. Is it a puzzle? Try this crossword puzzle to figure it all out!

Pi Day is celebrated every year on March 14th. The reason of course is that the day is denoted in some calendars as (3/14), which evokes of 3.14, the first three digits of “π”. A thin excuse maybe but sufficient for the true believers to join along!

The occasion represents an annual opportunity for mathematics and science enthusiasts to recite the infinite charms of Pi, including its irrationality, to talk to friends and family about math and its uses, and, when everything else fails, simply eat pie.

Marking this day is a regular feature also in the Open Risk calendar. Mathematics is of-course an essential element of Quantitative Risk Management but at a deeper level a rational, scientific, approach to managing risk would seem to be at least a necessary condition for sound risk management.

You can read the rest of the blog post in the usual place but its not just warnings about the risks of excessive risk quantification!

We took the opportunity to release on Pi Day a new image of the openNPL platfrom for managing loan portfolio data that is suitable to run on the... Raspberry Pi, the tiny but mighty hobbyist computer.

Those familiar with the RPi and Docker can go directly to our docker hub and fetch the ARM/v7 image

We celebrate today, along with much of the world, the March 8th International Women's Day. Gender Equality is one of the Sustainable Development Goals and while much has been achieved since the first marking of that date in 1917, there is still so much to do, in some many parts of the world, and in so many contexts.

The discipline and tools of risk management seem at first technical, abstract and far removed from these vital societal struggles but that is only if we stay on the stylized surface of things and avoid questioning the purpose and objectives of formal (professional) risk management. In fact both financial and general risk management touches the question of gender equality in many distinct and profound ways:

• As the financial literacy and financial inclusion of women in the formal economy e.g., in the context of Sustainable Finance.
• As discrimination and other risks faced by women in their labor relations (reflecting a holistic Occupational Risk Taxonomy that covers all aspects of a working person's exposure)
• As gender representation and opportunity in the Risk Management Function itself.

While in many countries there are now relatively more women in leadership positions that will surely provide ample future risk management heroes it is maybe appropriate to recall on this day one legendary such role model: Florence Nightingale is described as a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics, and is credited with developing the polar area diagram to illustrate seasonal sources of patient mortality in the military field hospital she managed. A more poignant example of female ingenuity using the tools of risk management to relieve the self-inflicted wounds of a male dominated society is hardly possible...

A new course is available at the Open Risk Academy (openly accessible) in the Data Science category: PYT26020, Overview of Python Semantic Web Tools

The course is for those interested in the overlap of Python with Semantic Web / Knowledge Graph technologies. It is a short CrashCourse format that covers a number of core frameworks / libraries such as rdflib / json-ld, owlready and pyshacl. A working installation / basic python knowledge is required. Semantic Data knowledge is not required (but is not provided beyond the bare essentials either)

As a realistic data set for illustrations and exercises we use a collection of information about European Credit Rating Agencies that is compiled into an OWL ontology.

Background domain knowledge about the Credit Ratings domain is available at the Open Risk Manual but is not really required for the course.

The data and code used in the course are available in our Github Repo

Enjoy, and as always we value your feedback on how to improve the Academy!

At Open Risk we celebrate all things open source and FOSDEM is the biggest celebration of them all!

If you are not familiar, FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized event centered on free and open-source software development. FOSDEM is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. FOSDEM is held annually since 2001, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium. Obviously this year the entire event is virtual and thus anybody anywhere in the world has equal access!.

Continuing with a tradition we started last year we will attempt to get a glimpse at what the open source community is up to those days (or at least what they want to talk about!). To get an overview of what topics are “cross-cutting” (affecting multiple projects) at FOSDEM we will use the talk abstracts (710 talk descriptions) and process it to extract unique keywords that appear across talks. You can read further details about the analysis and results here.

Enjoy!