TheThirdPillar - Reinvigorating Communities

A Research & Do Foundation to create a Community Economy anchored around Skills.

The Why

State and Markets Leave the Community behind

The inspiration for the name "TheThirdPillar" is from the book by the same name by Mr. Raghuram Rajan. Historically, we've seen the states and the markets leave the communities behind.

This foundation will give more power to communities powered by empowered individuals (Gig Workers)

Think Tanks have become Facilitators of Crony Capitalism

Think Tanks are at at its best a non-partisan academic policy paper churning institution or a peddler of crony capitalism at its worst.

If Lean startups are possible why not Lean Policy making ? Hence a research and do foundation / institution will be the ideal policy making institution of the future and we are laying the foundations for that.

Reductionism is a worse Pandemic

When the Queen of England summoned the best economists in Europe to enquire about the 2008 Financial Crisis all they could come up with was "we din't take into account the systemic risk". Really!

Modern problems are more complex than the linear multi-variate regression models can capture. Systems Dynamics applied to the labour market is our core research component.

Research - Areas

Macro to Micro to Individual / Behavioural Economics

Macro Research: Unemployment ~ f(Labour Market Frictions )

We base this research on 2010 Nobel Prize for Economics Sciences winners Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides who focuses on specific frictions due to costly search and pairwise matching, i.e., the explicit difficulties buyers and sellers have in locating each other, thereby resulting in failure of markets to clear at all points in time.

Verification Friction

Verification in a hiring process is done to ensure the viability and truthfulness of the candidate and get insights on their behavioural tendencies.

Validation Friction

Validation is a useful step to gain insights on the abilities and traits of an employee and helps to decide whether the candidate will fit into the workplace culture or not. In simple words, it helps to predict the performance of the candidate for the desired role.

Search & Match Friction

Search friction, in a mathematical sense, would mean the rate of time at which the employers and the desired employee connect for a new job vacancy. In layman terms, it reflects the impediments caused in finding the desired employee with requisite skill sets for a job vacancy.

Onboarding & Exit Friction

Onboarding friction reflects towards challenges faced in employee integration with the organization often characterized by confusion in the mind of the employees related to work performed and organization whereabouts.

Micro Research - Community as the balance between the State and the Market

We base this research on Raghuram Rajan's book TheThirdPillar - how the state and the markets leave the community behind. Though he talks about space based communities we venture into skill based communities first cos Skills are a better place as the above macro research indicates.

Cobb Douglas - Production Function

Output ~ f ( capital, labour & productivity). The Cobb–Douglas production function is especially notable for being the first time an aggregate or economy-wide production function had been developed, estimated, and then presented to the profession for analysis; it marked a landmark change in how economists approached macroeconomics from a microeconomics perspective.

Capital - Market

The role of the Market is to leverage the productive labour the state has helped develop and create a demand for the same.

Labour - State

The role of the State is to create an environment (through policies, governance) to create a productive labour force and for it to thrive.

Productivity

Productivity is a factor that affects both capital (technology adoption) and labour (efficient individual).

Community - Microcosm of an Economy

Since we've used up all three factors in the production function, the ideal way to look at community is as a "microcosm of an economy" i.e. all three factors but in a small scale. So a skill-based community creates a space to inculcate and grow skills (labour) and also generates demand for those skills (capital) in a an efficient way through dynamic processes (productivity).

Behavioral Research: Data Ownership & Wellbeing of a Gig worker

Since a gig worker / productive individual is the core to a community economy. At a unit level it's important to optimise for an individual

Wellbeing ~ f ( Physiological, Financial, Psychological & Social)

The overall wellbeing of a gig worker is optimised along 4 different aspects which can be bucketed as above.

DO - Areas

Skill based Communities to test out our Research in parallel.

Making these Communities work at Scale - SkillsChain

A Decentralised Frictionless Skill Movement platform which lets the end user and partners own their Data and thus creating a more equitable labour economy.

SkillsChain Network

We believe liberty is a forever narrow corridor. The narrow corridor suggesting a set of rules for the governance. Enough room to wiggle but not so much as to wander. We may not get it right the first time, but we can always tune the variables(go read about system design approach). Hence, our decision to build the heart and soul of our endeavor as a permissioned decentralized network. We cannot be grateful enough for the efforts of the entire team behind Hyperledger Fabric. When we discovered Fabric, we were building an enterprise solution, and as the idea of The Third Pillar took form, we realized Fabric was the perfect product for our permissioned network. Read More

Shield: Chromium Extension to Facilitate Data Ownership

While the narrow corridor sets up the conditions for the idea of liberty, we believe there is one more pre-requisite, an extremely important one at that: DATA OWNERSHIP. We have removed passwords from our applications and put a magic box inside this crypto (not cryptocurrency, you capital leveraging baboon) extension we call Shield. Corny ? We know. Shield will generate and store your keys on your devices, which ensures you are in control (and accountable), authenticate your sessions on the network applications, encrypt/decrypt private data and generate signatures for validations.Read More

Application > Identity: A Logical look at the Skill Identity

We believe an individual is a representation of their action and action alone and not thoughts. Thoughts are like air, they are all around us and all individuals are capable of observing them at all times, socio-economic advantages aside. These thoughts are not a part of you unless it translates into action. That is when you own that thought. Identity is an attempt to show the world on your behalf, all your actions and derive from those actions, your virtues to partly answer the question: "Who are you?". It will let you create, track and manage digitally verified documents that certify pieces of information about you. All this while you, and only you, decides who gets to access it.

Read More

Application > Gigs: - A Gig Application with double sided Auctions

Gigs is that final piece of puzzle that enables the movement of skill. Each gig is an atomic task either to learn/build a skill or to consume that skill to earn. Building Gigs on top of this permissioned network with validated Identities helps us tackle the labor market frictions of verification, validation, search and match with relative ease.

Read More

Sound, too good to be true. Who's behind this?

Founding Team

Moses Sam Paul

Chief Execution Officer | Founding Partner

Gaurav Singh

Head of Technology | Founding Partner

Community (Consortium) Members

Full Node runners of SkillsChain with RoamResearch offline

Anvesh

Partner - StopBeingBoring

Giridhar Gopal

Partner - MadAboutGrowth

Pranshu Agarwal

Partner - StrangerSapiens

KarthiGanesh

Partner - QuantumComputingIndia

Partner - Milan Global

TheThirdPillar Consortium's Board of Directors - Ideal Scenario. (Not a reality, yet!)

Imagine such virtuous humans on the board of a Consortium that runs this Community Economy!

Ratan Tata

TATA Sons - Emeritus Chairman

Ella Bhatt

Founder - SEWA

Raghuram Rajan

Finance Prof - Chicago Booth School of Business

Conor White Sullivan

Founder - RoamResearch

Dee Hock

Founder - VISA

Jack Dorsey

Founder - Twitter, Square & Bitcoin - Trust Fund

Kamal Haasan

Founder - Makkal Needhi Maiam

Shraddha Sharma

Founder - YourStory

John Martin RICHARDSON, Jr

Prof - System Dynamics

Our Thoughts and Language are heavily influenced by these Books and Papers

NOT signalling. A common vocabulary helps us connect and get to work faster!

TheThirdPillar

We're Poor but so many

One from Many

BitCoin Whitepaper

The Internet of Money

BlockChain for Dummies

Wealth Of Nations

Why I'm a Liberal

Breakout Nations

Future Politics

Jobs Crisis in India

Building the New Economy

Future of Capitalism

Search Frictions & Unemployment

Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking & Modeling for the Complex World

Identity

Small is Beautiful

Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data

Contact Us

Got any questions? Don't hesitate to reach out.