One critical aspect of DAO design is how we create a culture that doesn't dawdle, yet also doesn't burn out its people.
What I mean by the title of this post is that is tradorgs have a nasty habit of treating the time of their people like an infinite resource. I've spent days in budget meetings where people were loath to spend a Euro over the budget, but would obliviously sign up for twice the work the staff could handle because it was “cheap”. The result: pain!
Tradorgs also often ignore that not everyone is alike when it comes to getting something done. A time estimate would be based on having a senior person that knew what they were doing, but would then be assigned to someone who just started last week. Needless to say, those estimates were rarely met.
Making this more visible would be a big help, as long as we don’t turn this into a time sheet exercise (ugh). Fortunately, web3’s obsession with tokenizing everything works in our favor in this case. When pondering this, for some reason Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the title of this post came to mind. What would it look like to tokenize the time of our contributors?
Assume a DAO estimates how much time each person could devote to DAO work in the next episode and created “pledge tokens” for each 30 minute increment, per person? The pledge token supply would represent our work capacity, which we could then start to assign to our backlog of things to be done and slack time that can be spent at the discretion of each person.
That last bit is really important, BTW. If we try to schedule at 100%, we have no flexibility. If there's anything humanity should have learned (and relearned) in the last 3 years, it is that the future is uncertain. A good heuristic is to limit scheduled activities to 70% to allow time for overruns, brilliant new ideas, random emergencies, etc.
Let’s say I get involved with an Impact DAO doing this and pledge 15 hours during the episode. The DAO would mint 30 pledge tokens to represent the half hours I said I would contribute. 21 of those pledge tokens would be available to the DAO for task assignments, while the other 9 would be at my discretion to allocate to DAO tasks. My pledge tokens, plus all the other participant pledge tokens, would constitute the total supply of people’s time we can assign to tasks during the episode.
As I take on tasks, the DAO would burn those tokens. If I make extra time available, the DAO would mint additional tokens to show that had occurred. At the end of the episode, any remaining pledge tokens would be burned. This would make it much easier to do several things such as the following:
Assess how much time various tasks actually took versus expectations
See who tends to gravitate to different kinds of tasks
Verify that “glue work” that is often marginalized is seen and valued
Ensure equal treatment of desirable (and undesirable) tasks
Adjust expectations for how much time people spend on DAO tasks versus their expectations
There have been some experiments along these lines, and I expect to see more of them as DAOs explore the space of possibilities for organizing and taking on challenges. Done well, this is another area where DAOs can outcompete tradorgs in executing on challenging work without burning out its people.
** This post is heavily based on a series of messages I originally posted in the Orca Protocol Discord server between 2022-01-15 and 2022-01-17, with modifications to address feedback raised, improve clarity and reflect (hopefully!) improved thinking since then. Thanks to all in the Orca Protocol (now Metropolis) community who provided input, feedback, and support regarding these concepts.