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The primary reason for moving here to this job is to figure out what is the best way to sell my labor. Some of the questions I have been asking all this while from my high school is the purpose of educating myself but the tide took me along and I consider myself lucky to get the opportunities to study, work and therefore to spend and lead a decent life. I learned the tricks and the skills that were appropriate for the job market but the question remained: What am I working for?

Capital grew it's dominance when the symbiotic relation between the group composed of artisans who possessed skills to manufacture goods; and the other group that went and sold these goods; morphed into labor and capital classes where one group exploited the other. When capital accumulated and new avenues to be prospected grew, the decision to impart necessary new skills moved into domain of the capital. I gained this understanding from reading the yet to be completed book -

IT in India is in the clutches of a few people and when a growing demand for the artisans manifested, it is all chaos. The industry did not emanate from these artisans, instead to accomplish some other tasks, primarily in activities that perpetuate the furtherance of the hegemony of the capital, the Indian IT industry sprouted up. The problem with the growth of anything in the most inorganic way is a dichotomy between human labor and dignity in the real sense where labor's primary function is to sow the seeds of originality.

I believe decentralization is essential and smaller sustainable communities are the solution for many problems that afflict the mankind. Trust and collaboration will be the ingredients of the glue that will not only hold a particular community together but can ideally bring many such communities to work together for each individual's benefit.

Today, platforms like github or gitlab allow collaborative software system building. There are also platforms that allow collaborative content writing like wikipedia. What fascinates me is the thought of extending the collaboration to other fields like governance, education, commerce, etc.

Governance has two facets to it. The act of making decisions on how to govern and the act of implementing these decisions. Can a system help play each scene as the governance is getting enacted or is unfolding? The smartness in governance should be a direct function of citizen participation in governance. How should a platform be structured to facilitate policy makers, bureaucracy and the citizens collaborate in effecting participatory governance?

In commerce too, many redundancies could be done away in a platform that allows collaboration between the actual producers and the consumers. What does it take for a producers' co-operative(s) to directly engage with consumers' co-operative(s)? - a system that has the ability to trace each transaction from the raw material to the delivery of the finished product.

Are there any underlying similarities between the above platforms that allow collaboration? Is there a basic principle or a set of principles that can be modelled for all such platforms? The state transformation of a system can be modelled as a function that reacts to the input to move to another state while maintaining a set of in-variants. Then any collaborative platform which by itself is a state machine can be envisaged as a composition of such systems. The challenge is to define such an abstraction to quickly build and compose platforms.

I fathom that one of the ways to glean this abstraction is to build multiple such platforms. The motivation for me is two fold here: this process of research and building systems will ground me soundly in computer science; and the other is to participate and influence the policy to adapt such platforms that help transparency, collaboration and trust.