In Protocol-first DAO Strategy, I argued that DAOs should build on value-generating protocols before cultivating broader community engagement. Specifically, I endorsed the advantages of framing DAOs as governance-minimized platforms. This advice may have sounded irrelevant to DAOs operating in non-protocol settings, but we may need to expand our imaginations. Any systematic, repeatable process is amenable to protocolization. In this essay, I'll describe an approach for progressively tran...

In Protocol-first DAO Strategy, I argued that DAOs should build on value-generating protocols before cultivating broader community engagement. Specifically, I endorsed the advantages of framing DAOs as governance-minimized platforms. This advice may have sounded irrelevant to DAOs operating in non-protocol settings, but we may need to expand our imaginations. Any systematic, repeatable process is amenable to protocolization. In this essay, I'll describe an approach for progressively tran...

One of the big promises of DAOs is data transparency - the idea that every person, every decision, and every resource could be crystal clear on an open programmable ledger. This level of visibility is the dream, but what's the reality? This grand vision has yet to materialize fully. Data is public but needs to be legible; we need evaluation frameworks, ecosystem health scores still need to be explored, and DAO designers need to promote improved approaches. How do we close the gap?Polygon...

One of the big promises of DAOs is data transparency - the idea that every person, every decision, and every resource could be crystal clear on an open programmable ledger. This level of visibility is the dream, but what's the reality? This grand vision has yet to materialize fully. Data is public but needs to be legible; we need evaluation frameworks, ecosystem health scores still need to be explored, and DAO designers need to promote improved approaches. How do we close the gap?Polygon...

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https://banklessdao.mirror.xyz/QQA6ZhvHtDefWEAT-SXaHYPYMtHUhshtXX5dY-gv0u8

How and why DAOs came about will inevitably influence how we think we can and should use them. If they came about exclusively as a response to oppressive and extractive corporations, it's unlikely that we'll envision them as potential complements to traditional businesses. If, on the other hand, we see them as a natural next step in a more significant technical arch of business capabilities, then we'll look for suitable places to apply them. This approach is the most helpful le...

Public goods are excellent, but who funds them? Are all DAOs public goods? How can a DAO be autonomous if its continued existence rests on charitable grants from others? Is profitability "extractive" at best and a blatant violation of the hyperstructure thesis at worst? When faced with the rhetoric of the current Web3 ethos, these are the questions you must ask yourself. In September 2013, Stan and Dan Larimer (father/son) published their vision for Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) i...

The DAO conversation almost exclusively revolves around governance. The entire space effectively speaks of them equivocally. One cause for this is that pooling money pre-product (community-first) makes the collective management of those funds an immediate need. Then after people realize the overhead of collective decision-making, they try to implement delegation; this further entrenches the conversation on the topic of governance and nothing else. Centering DAOs on governance is a mistake and...

The unstructured community-first experiment has failed. The truth is that small founding teams create winning products and services. The community-first maxim militates against this, arguing that success correlates to the number of people in Discord. This assumption encourages a "bread and circuses" pattern of paying people for low-value activities. It also conflates those with a founder mentality with contributors seeking paid work. Community-first must give way to protocol-first, which enta...

If you've worked in the DAO space for any length of time, the question of legal incorporation is bound to arise. It seems the reflex impulse to wrap a newly formed DAO in a legal wrapper to attain increased legitimacy or supposed legal protection. It sounds reasonable, but a careful unpacking of terms and concepts reveals deep confusion. The dominant meme of DAOs as internet native businesses, while helpful, is insufficient. Not only are DAOs not legal businesses, but they can't be ...

DAOs desperately need skilled project managers. As every skill set required by a project is potentially an entirely different agent or collection of agents, the need for a kind of general contractor to piece together disparate deliverables is essential. Traditional models of team forming/norming/storming do not work when people and groups themselves are transient and lack reputation systems. Even existing highly skilled project managers must reinterpret and reassess the tools of their trade t...

Not everyone who joins your Discord server is a member of your DAO, and neither should they be. Different levels of community engagement have different privileges and expectations, and to conflate them is a disservice to your community. Some people want to participate casually, while others are seeking full-time employment. Some join for leisure, while others aim to untie the Gordian knot of decentralized governance. Other issues arise from misaligned financial incentives. Members with a $500...

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are the next evolution in human organization. They are enabled by the Internet and will, most assuredly, have an impact just as large. While their present state is one of early infancy, they are the ground soil from which the world’s first true digitally native nations will emerge. It’s in their core design to enable outputs and outcomes of greater efficiency than traditional organizations could ever hope to imagine. This is wrought through at lea...

How and why DAOs came about will inevitably influence how we think we can and should use them. If they came about exclusively as a response to oppressive and extractive corporations, it's unlikely that we'll envision them as potential complements to traditional businesses. If, on the other hand, we see them as a natural next step in a more significant technical arch of business capabilities, then we'll look for suitable places to apply them. This approach is the most helpful le...

Public goods are excellent, but who funds them? Are all DAOs public goods? How can a DAO be autonomous if its continued existence rests on charitable grants from others? Is profitability "extractive" at best and a blatant violation of the hyperstructure thesis at worst? When faced with the rhetoric of the current Web3 ethos, these are the questions you must ask yourself. In September 2013, Stan and Dan Larimer (father/son) published their vision for Decentralized Autonomous Companies (DACs) i...

The DAO conversation almost exclusively revolves around governance. The entire space effectively speaks of them equivocally. One cause for this is that pooling money pre-product (community-first) makes the collective management of those funds an immediate need. Then after people realize the overhead of collective decision-making, they try to implement delegation; this further entrenches the conversation on the topic of governance and nothing else. Centering DAOs on governance is a mistake and...

The unstructured community-first experiment has failed. The truth is that small founding teams create winning products and services. The community-first maxim militates against this, arguing that success correlates to the number of people in Discord. This assumption encourages a "bread and circuses" pattern of paying people for low-value activities. It also conflates those with a founder mentality with contributors seeking paid work. Community-first must give way to protocol-first, which enta...

If you've worked in the DAO space for any length of time, the question of legal incorporation is bound to arise. It seems the reflex impulse to wrap a newly formed DAO in a legal wrapper to attain increased legitimacy or supposed legal protection. It sounds reasonable, but a careful unpacking of terms and concepts reveals deep confusion. The dominant meme of DAOs as internet native businesses, while helpful, is insufficient. Not only are DAOs not legal businesses, but they can't be ...

DAOs desperately need skilled project managers. As every skill set required by a project is potentially an entirely different agent or collection of agents, the need for a kind of general contractor to piece together disparate deliverables is essential. Traditional models of team forming/norming/storming do not work when people and groups themselves are transient and lack reputation systems. Even existing highly skilled project managers must reinterpret and reassess the tools of their trade t...

Not everyone who joins your Discord server is a member of your DAO, and neither should they be. Different levels of community engagement have different privileges and expectations, and to conflate them is a disservice to your community. Some people want to participate casually, while others are seeking full-time employment. Some join for leisure, while others aim to untie the Gordian knot of decentralized governance. Other issues arise from misaligned financial incentives. Members with a $500...

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are the next evolution in human organization. They are enabled by the Internet and will, most assuredly, have an impact just as large. While their present state is one of early infancy, they are the ground soil from which the world’s first true digitally native nations will emerge. It’s in their core design to enable outputs and outcomes of greater efficiency than traditional organizations could ever hope to imagine. This is wrought through at lea...