Gihan Jayatilaka : Blog : Causes I care about

Specific things

• Universal healthcare and education (either free or extremely affordable).
• Green open access (OA) publishing.
  Springer and Elsevier has articles explaining the difference between Green and Gold open access publications. However, they are intentionally biased towards gold OA (because they care more about money). For all practical purposes, "the closest to final version as legally allowed on arxiv" (green OA) + paywalled is as good as gold OA.
• Normalizing mental health support.
  I personally believe everyone can benifit from both an informal (mostly friends/family) mental health support system as well as a professional (couceller/therapist/psychatrist) support system. It is also crucial to go to the professionals when the informal support is not enough.
  [Sharing personal experiences to de-stigmatize mental health struggles: I have benifited from therapists in handling work stress and certain personal issues in the past.]
• Pay transparency.
  (Specifically, for graduate students. CS Stipend Rankings)
• Openining all general education institutes in Sri Lanka to all demographics (instead of segregating them by gender, religion or ethnicity).
• Sri Lanka becoming a secular state.
• Eradicating ragging (hazing) from universities in Sri Lanka.
• Extremely tight gun laws in USA.
• Bike lanes! (specifically, Terps4bikeLankes).
  Pera ride is another cool idea (which is somewhat correlated to this cause).