Disclaimer: these thoughts might not sound "unconventional" to you. They are quite personal and not all-round type, i.e., they might not cover the topics that you consider important.

     DAO has usually been put into the "Web3.0" narrative listing amongst the other Web3.0 concepts like NFT, DeFi, Metaverse, etc. However, it is actually not a crypto concept. The key ideas of DAO include fairer incentive mechanism to individuals, more transparent and more automatic decision processes, more flexible and variant means of work and collaboration, etc. These ideas, however, are not new to the science of management in the sense that these are exactly what good companies or organizations are pursuing. Indeed, the blockchain technology, as well as all the infrastructures in Web3.0, are the enablers and boosters of DAO. However, DAO as a form for organization, is not limited to Web3.0 applications. The truth is most of the DAOs are related to Web3.0 and the majority of the participants have some background in blockchain and crypto. It is also true that many crypto projects following the tracks of Bitcoin and Ethereum are more similar to DAOs than corporations or organizations outside of the crypto world. Then, naturally, Web3.0 start-ups are more willingly to embrace DAOs. However, none of these facts suggests that DAO should not be used outsides of the crypto world. In fact, as traditional companies face the challenge of the post-covid world, the demand for a new form of organization is actually more urgent than the Web3.0 world. As a result, it leaves the DAO believers to create tools and tutorials for the non-crypto users as what has once be done for internet and information technology in the past. People should be able to freely organize as DAOs and work in DAO only knowing that it is more efficient, more transparent, and more financially rewarding without any knowledge in blockchain or crypto. This leaves a huge task as well as market for the DAO tooling developers to make tools that target the non-crypto users in traditional industries.

The idea of DAO was raised in 2016 alongside Ethereum. It is overzealously considered that with the aids of Ethereum, all decision makings, executions, productions, and financial activities could be automated by smart contracts. However, the fantasy of DAO immediately crashed in a security incident, from which we learned a lesson on how amateur we were in smart contract developing. Then, the idea of DAO was revived as blockchain technology matures and protocols like MonochDAO is developed. The DAO that we are talking about in this article follows this track of development. However, the rise of "governance token" is, on the other hand, a different story. The concept is made popular by MakerDAO (a loan-based stablecoin protocol on Ethereum), where it is introduced as a token that grants you the access to important decisions and adjustments in the MakerDAO protocol. Then, the governance token, namely MKR, is commonly believed to have its price linked to the success of MakerDAO, thus the “stock” of MakerDAO in a traditional sense. This concept was later on widely used by several DeFi protocol in which the governance tokens are used to incentivize users. In this cases, the tokens are mainly proposed as a way to raise funds and incentivize liquidity providers and was seldom used to govern the protocol. In other words, the features of the governance tokens in fundraising, incentivizing, and catching value in the DeFi market, are emphasized. On the contrary, the essence of the governance token, governance, is undermined.  Hence, if we take a step back and reconsider the DeGov problem, we will find that the governance token might not be the best option for governance. For example, as many articles on DAO practices have suggested, it is generally not a good idea to allow capital to buy tokens from the market and accumulate decision-making power in a project. On one hand, this method favors the capital as they could buy tokens to vote for their motions. On the other hand, this might expose the DAO to the danger of attacks, as attackers could buy tokens from the market to make irresponsible or even harmful decisions. Currently, it has been widely discussed if some other indicators, e.g., NFT badges or Soul-bounded Tokens (SBTs), should be used in the governance process instead of governance tokens. In the meantime, we might also want to take a page from the governance of a company, where the right to get economical bonus, namely the stocks, are seperated from the governance (the execution board). Hence, it is more appropriate to mint the ownership property of a DAO to a token with economical rights, but not directly linked it to the governance.

The iconical feature of DAO is voting for decentralized governance. It is crucial that all members should take part in the decision making process, which is the basic spirit of DAO. However, the process of voting is in practice, not ideology. In most of the cases, members are not interested in all governance decisions. The voting rates in many DAOs, even the very active ones, are not exceeding 10% and usually very one-sided. Then, the voting process is less essential when the decision is actually made somewhere else. As a result, the inefficiency of voting become almost a "necessary evil", i.e., it is a painful process that the DAOs must go through in order to keep the decision "decentralized". Then, it leaves the DAO tooling to ease the pain of voting, e.g., gathered the proposals in bulletins, making the voting process less complicated, and more accessible to DAO members. In my opinion, this completely distorts the idea of DAO and DeGov. Voting is not an inefficient governance process and governance is not merely a voting mechanism. The whole idea behind voting is to involve all members of the DAO in the whole decision making process so that they are fully aware of and supportive to the decision. This might extend the decision making process, which appears to be inefficient. However, from an organizational perspective, the efficiency is improved as members could execute the decision with higher precision and momentum. This is in fact one of the many advantages that DAO has over traditional organization. Hence, instead of aiming for improving the voting process, DAOs should start to consider governance as a whole: the members ought to be involved even when the proposals are still shaping. They should be given opportunities to understand the proposals and express their opinions before the votes are cast. Hence, a good tool for DAO governance should be able to provide aids to the whole process instead of merely the voting. Some would call this idealistic: how is it possible to demand higher involvement when the members are not willing to even cast votes? I would answer this question by jumping out of the box: what's the point of voting if the voter do not understand what he/she is voting for or he/she is not affected by the result of the voting? How would DeGov then make the DAO more efficient than other organizations? If the answer to these two questions are unclear, then there is no point in involving those members as voters in the first place. In particular, we believe the decision making process should be deliberately designed so that the correct members are involved.