The Collective
Who tends the commons
The commons is grown by nodes — separate lanes of work, each with someone looking after it and a record of what it has brought in. What people contribute is collected and counted, never scored or ranked. Browse everything →
lofl — the tools node
Tools you can play with that never send your data anywhere. Everything runs in your browser and stays on your device.
- Living Learning Kit — Pick a subject, draw a colour lens, take a skill card, go outside, and bring back one honest line. Then press your own badge. Badges build up as a set, never a score.
- The Living Learning Kit · At School — The classroom edition, for Grades 1-5. Seven subjects drawn from what the educators actually teach, a printable set of cards for when there is no screen, a two-page teacher's guide, and a consent protocol your school finishes itself. Download the folder and it runs with no internet at all.
- ter-bot — One hook, one matching practice card, तर? — then nothing until you come back with something you did. It is built to make you leave.
- Shabdayātrā — A diary of words you went looking for. Record where a word travelled, or why you refused it, stamp where it came from, and export one card.
- Aikā — play a session — A session dealt fresh each time: one seed drawn from the deck, questioned, then carried into one or two more of the seven colours — and you press your own mark. No score, no winner, and nothing leaves your device.
- Design Language — The shared vocabulary everything else is built from — tokens, chips, stage ladders, artifact cards, licence lanes and the AI Assist Scale. v0.4.
- AI for ALL — pricing navigator — Nāgarika, Sahakāra, Vivekī and Hastakāra, priced plainly, with an enquiry panel that never sends anything for you.
- The AI Usage Cards — a citizen's deck — Nine plain cards that turn AI disclosure into something a person can actually fill in and show — Carrier, Spark, Lantern, Path, Loom, Mirror, Forge, Stream, Compass. Fill one, press the mark, show it.
- Social Commodities Explorer — Not an exchange — a teaching instrument. A map of seven social commodities (what each is, who tends it, what public evidence exists in India), then one lesson: construct a hypothetical social-outcome contract and watch its moral hazard surface immediately. Hard-codes 'do not deploy' on every path.
- Core Map v0.1 — A seasonal self-portrait in six movements — Mūla, Vartamāna, Poshan, Chakra, Samyak, Sevā — each ending in a promise with a rhythm and a witness. The witness field is where sākṣī first turned out to be load-bearing.
- Listening Protocol v0.1 — Five steps for a group that wants to hear itself: Core Map, then Event Preferences, Connection Card, Reflection and Pulse. Written plainly enough that any group can run it without us.
cards — the deck engine
Practice-card decks, grown out of rabbit-holes and live projects. Every card carries its own fingerprint and licence, and the deck is the unit you use.
- LOFL · dāna — money that comes back — Built from a live Rang De peer-lending pipeline · 1 card · do it, show it, check it, give back
- LOFL · Getting to Philosophy — Wikipedia's 'Getting to Philosophy' crossed with LOFL · 7 cards · do it, show it, check it, give back
- LOFL · the knowledge-garden prism — Grown from 7 saved bookmarks · 7 cards · do it, show it, check it, give back
- LOFL · tend the garden — A rabbit-hole through knowledge gardens, wikis and pattern languages · 5 cards · do it, show it, check it, give back
atlas — the commons atlas
Curated plates in two series. Resource plates list commons resources we have checked, saying who controls each one and keeping the failures visible. Timeline Plates render cited chronologies you can check. Reference sets, never rankings.
- Commons Atlas · Plate 000 — 15 commons resources we checked one by one, each saying who controls it, keeping the failures visible, with per-check tallies and nothing excluded outright. A reference set, never a ranking.
- The Commons Atlas — The way into the atlas: Timeline Plates — cited chronologies you can check — each naming on its own face what it cannot show.
- Deep-Time · education — India and the world — 40 entries · 8 open questions · 8 named gaps · 12 disagreements, 2686 BCE to 2020. The argument over the world's oldest university is carried as content rather than settled: English hedges, Hindi asserts Nalanda, Arabic raises al-Zaytuna. The largest gap we name is exclusion — this method records when things were founded, not who was kept out.
- Deep-Time · vital essence — 29 entries, weighted toward the modern end — humoral and doshic systems, through vitalism, to modern biochemistry. The first edition was too hard to read, and that failure rewrote the method: densities worked out from the data, labels packed to fit, and living practice given its own strip.
- Deep-Time · Indus script — Four thousand objects, four hundred signs, and the longest text is thirty-four characters. Edition 2 runs about 30 entries from Mehrgarh to transformer models, keeps the decipherment argument live in both directions, and lists nine open questions and nine named gaps.
- Deep-Time · knock — The sound a fuel makes when asked to do more than it can. Two kinds of stored sunlight — one buried a hundred million years, one fermented last season — meeting inside one cylinder, and a hundred-year argument about it. WCAG 2.1 AA, and every entry is also published as plain running text.
- Deep-Time · the moving image — storytelling in light — Lascaux's flicker-animated deer, the camera obscura from Mozi to Ibn al-Haytham, wayang's 840 CE inscription, then the magic lantern through to Toy Story. Katha and living wayang appear as presence rather than dated points. Generative video sits on the horizon as a position we are taking, not a prediction.
csr — the corporate-spending node
Analysis of India's ₹40,794-crore CSR system built from the Government's own portal, and the citizen records that answer what it never published: which district, and what changed.
- India's CSR Gaps — the ₹40,794 Cr system vs India@2047 — Ten gaps in India's CSR system ranked by impact, from the parliamentary window to 2047. Built from eleven years of official portal data.
- The CSR Misallocation Index — CSR share divided by poor share, per state. Bihar 0.05, Goa 48.8 — a thousandfold spread in what a poor person's presence attracts.
- CSR Gap Dashboard — Every chart behind the analysis — state skew, sector concentration, the PSU slowdown — in one offline-capable page.
- India's CSR Has a Volume Story — and a Vector Problem — The 850-word argument: the money has solved volume, not vector, and a committee room is deciding whether that changes.
- Memorandum to the Joint Committee on the Corporate Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026 — Three evidence-backed amendments to Section 135, submitted to Parliament with a clause-wise annexure.
- Where does India's company charity money go? — The five-minute plain-language guide, also in Hindi and Marathi. No jargon, one comparison people remember.
- Three things you can do — A ready letter to an MP, a request asking what CSR funded in your district, and the numbers worth sharing.
- Ask where the CSR money went — RTI templates — Three ready-to-file RTI applications: district collector, public sector company, and the Ministry itself.
- Your state, in one card — Pick a state, get a shareable card showing what CSR reaches each poor person there.
- What people found — The open record of citizen requests about district CSR and what came back. A set, never a ranking.
- How we make these reports — The open method: frame around a live decision, find one honest number, verify before publishing, deliver for five readers.
markets — the household-money node
What market design does to household money, read out of the regulators' own published studies: who loses, who collects the fees on the way, and how much of the loss is a product decision rather than a trader's mistake.
- The Options Ledger — where ₹91,685 crore went — SEBI's FY25–FY26 study read in full: 87.7% of individual derivatives traders lost money in FY26, 92% of it in options, and ten algorithmic desks took ₹33,124 crore — three-quarters of all proprietary-desk profit.
- The Household Ledger — what the market promised, what it took — The same SEBI study as a ledger: every figure beside its source, graded by how directly it was verified, with the unsourceable claims kept on the page and marked.
samvada — the dialogue node
Instruments that go both ways: the person asking answers first, saying no is a valid answer, and answers come back side by side rather than as a score. Includes the witnessing piece that keeps the rest honest.
- Sāṃvāda & Signal — the door — One door, two lanes: five questions the founder answered before asking anyone else, and a place to say what did not work. It stores nothing and sends nothing until you press.
- LOFL Signal v0.1 — A lane for feedback where disagreement is the required field and praise is optional, filed separately. One line is all that ever leaves, and you press send yourself.
- Sāṃvāda Sheet v0.2 — 25 questions — The full two-way questionnaire for people who make education work — seven parts, with the founder's own answers beside each one, and the few still being written shown as unfinished. A Marathi edition follows inside the response window.
gate — specs at the approval gate
Designs that have been argued over and held back. Each one files its Position, Evidence, Counter-Argument, Consensus and Dissent. Nothing gets built or signed until it moves forward, and open disagreements stay listed rather than being tidied away.
- Sākṣī — the witness primitive — One name for a role that turns up three times without one: who is allowed to witness, what witnessing actually attests to (that something is faithful, never that it is good), and what gets signed — the witness's own promise. Three disagreements still open.
- Angootha Chaap — on-device stamping — The thumb press as a real cryptographic act: a WebAuthn signature tied to the promise itself, confirmed by fingerprint or PIN, with no OTP and no keys held on a server. A mark once used to mean exclusion, reclaimed to mean sovereignty. The shared-household objection is still open.
- Mātṛbhāṣā Forge — A forge for designing learning tools in the language you dream in. The felt draft comes first; the translation comes second. The scaffolding is Claude's, every mother-tongue word is the maker's. Two disagreements open, including whether the Sanskritic name is itself a power move about register.