What gets most of us very excited about DAOs is the spontaneous magic that they can manifest.

From purchasing high value NFTs or F1 teams, to vibing with people you never thought you’d have the opportunity to meet.

This phenomenon is called emergence and it’s magical: a flower blooming in spring, a sprout popping up from the soil, the birth of a child. It fills one with wonder (I write about designing web3 for wonder here).

But emergence does not happen in a vacuum, indeed it needs constraints to emerge from.

A blooming flower, a popping sprout of a newborn child all have very complex structures supporting their existence - DNA, RNA, subsistence needs… or more broadly: the laws of mother nature. However, these constraints allow for infinite possibilities to manifest.

Each DAO needs its own set of constraints.

We know that without constraint there is chaos. With too much constraint there are bottlenecks. Where do we draw the line?

Rodney Evans recently said three magical words: “Minimum Viable Constraint” (MVC) in the On The Other Side Podcast with Chase Chapman

I love this term.

It was not explicitly defined in the podcast so I’ll take a stab.

Minimum Viable Constraints is the least amount of constraints required for a DAO to thrive.

One example Rodney expounded upon to make her case is the emergence of Jazz. Random people don’t walk into a club, pick up musical instruments and make jazz - indeed that would be chaos. What unifies jazz players is a predetermined set of constraints. That might be a key to play in, scale variation and a set rhythm.

When each player finds consensus on these constraints and brings their own interpretation to the mix…we find magic.

This is the opportunity we have with DAOs.

When we carefully select our MVC we can determine what kind of magic we can create.

What gets most of us very excited about DAOs is the spontaneous magic that they can manifest.

From purchasing high value NFTs or F1 teams, to vibing with people you never thought you’d have the opportunity to meet.

This phenomenon is called emergence and it’s magical: a flower blooming in spring, a sprout popping up from the soil, the birth of a child. It fills one with wonder (I write about designing web3 for wonder here).

But emergence does not happen in a vacuum, indeed it needs constraints to emerge from.

A blooming flower, a popping sprout of a newborn child all have very complex structures supporting their existence - DNA, RNA, subsistence needs… or more broadly: the laws of mother nature. However, these constraints allow for infinite possibilities to manifest.

Each DAO needs its own set of constraints.

We know that without constraint there is chaos. With too much constraint there are bottlenecks. Where do we draw the line?

Rodney Evans recently said three magical words: “Minimum Viable Constraint” (MVC) in the On The Other Side Podcast with Chase Chapman

I love this term.

It was not explicitly defined in the podcast so I’ll take a stab.

Minimum Viable Constraints is the least amount of constraints required for a DAO to thrive.

One example Rodney expounded upon to make her case is the emergence of Jazz. Random people don’t walk into a club, pick up musical instruments and make jazz - indeed that would be chaos. What unifies jazz players is a predetermined set of constraints. That might be a key to play in, scale variation and a set rhythm.

When each player finds consensus on these constraints and brings their own interpretation to the mix…we find magic.

This is the opportunity we have with DAOs.

When we carefully select our MVC we can determine what kind of magic we can create.