The first sights
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
This document provides a quick on boarding to understand the rationale, design, realization of services and platforms that enable collaboration and co-operation.
2 Rationale
Decentralization is essential for smaller and sustainable communities to flourish. One of the key ingredients to make smaller communities sustainable is co-operation and collaboration. The belief is that transparency plays a vital part among other factors that enable co-operation and collaboration within these communities. Such communities can be envisaged as fractals where larger communities composed of such fractals would also exhibit the same behaviour.
Let us take a concrete example to explain this. A group of farmers come together to form a cooperative to organize themselves to effectively farm, add value to their produce and sell value added products. Since the members are equal partners, each member has a right to go through every transaction that happens within the cooperative. The transactions could include purchase of farm inputs, setting up of the processing units, managing these units, sale of either produce or processed products, etc. Likewise, the consumers who buy from this co-operative would demand such a transparency from the farmers' co-operative to know how the food is grown; what were the inputs; what were the farming methods employed; for him or her to make a knowledgeable decision. Both these cooperatives might want to utilize the services of another cooperative that collaborates in moving the farm produce from the producer to the consumer.
What comes across from the above scenario is the necessity to capture different types of information and make it available at different levels for different users. At one level there is information that is necessary for the members of an organization and at another level is the information that is necessary for the consumers of a service. The information flow becomes a conduit to transparency.
The question to ask now is whether there is a role for information technology to build the necessary infrastructure to enable this flow of information. Till date platforms like github and gitlab have allowed people to get together to write software collaboratively; made possible by the evolution of an ecosystem of services that are dependent and layered. Therefore the answer should be a resounding 'yes'.
2.1 TODO [0/4]
[ ]Elaborate on why decentralization is better, link it to systems theory and argue that the possibility of building tighter feedback loops suddenly shows up on the horizon.[ ]What are the other factors or practices that make a community sustainable? Does transparency in itself make a community sustainable? If transparency aids decision making, does it mean these decisions allow adopting practices that are sustainable. Answer these questions.[ ]Murray Bookchin believes -Liberatory technologiesfrom renewables to developments in miniaturization and automation combined with broader forms of social and political reorganization, could open up unprecedented possibilities for self-management and sustainable abundance. This line is as is from the same article. Quote more authors like E.F. Schumacher author ofSmall is Beautiful.[ ]John Rushkin in the book Unto the Last, talks about the supreme sacrifice of a soldier and asks what actions in commerce entail such nobleness. He opines that a soldier's trade is not slaying but being slain in defense of others and therefore such a high esteem of the profession. But he also felt that the general public views commerce as a transaction between a buyer who tries to cheapen and a seller who tries to cheat. One way to elevate commerce to nobleness of a soldier could be to provide the highest transparency. How to include this idea?