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Blog iconRnDAO
Mar 27

Decisions in DAOs - What Causes the Pain?

The idea of a DAO - a Decentralized Autonomous Organization - rests on the belief that groups of people (an organization) can act (be autonomous) without relying on a single (centralized) person to make decisions. Sadly, the vast majority of DAOs struggle with this vital capability. Simple DAOs with simple goals (“maximize returns on our fund investments”) have found ways to make decisions efficiently through proposing and voting. But almost any DAO with a complex goal (“build and run a platf...

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Why and How we SubDAO

What is a DAO? Conceptual Foundations

What is a DAO? Conceptual Foundations

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Decisions in DAOs - What Causes the Pain?

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How do we measure community health in Web3?

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What is a Web3 Community and when is it healthy: a working paper by RnDAO

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Top 9 Challenges of DAO Unit Success

RnDAO

Written by
danielospinabotero

@RnDAO__ is an innovation DAO with a mission to Empower Humane Collaboration. We research DAOs and build collaboration tools

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Blog iconRnDAO
Sep 14
How do we measure community health in Web3?
We embarked on a research journey to understand how we could meaningfully define Web3 communities and assess their health. This article is a short summary of our findings. For those interested in the depths of this rabbit hole, here's the full paper.Does Community Health matter?Much like traditional companies, historically, the medical field focused on treating illnesses. Little action would be taken to care for people until something went wrong and immediate actions were needed. As time...
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Blog iconRnDAO
Aug 14
What is a Web3 Community and when is it healthy: a working paper by RnDAO
In this paper we propose conceptual foundations for defining a DAO community and propose how a DAO community’s health can be measured. Specifically, we seek to answer the following questions:What are the features of a community?We begin very broadly, explaining how we understand what a community is, and what its central features are. We conclude that it is a system of individuals at the micro-level. However, it has several subsystems and communities themselves belong to the larger ecosystem. ...
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Blog iconRnDAO
Aug 6
Top 9 Challenges of DAO Unit Success
Creating and running a DAO Unit is a challenging task. Our research, in partnership with Sobol, identified 9 key challenges of operating DAO Units (DAO Teams, Guilds, and Pods). We researched the problems in adding Units to DAOs. We spoke with multiple DAO builders to ensure representativeness and validation of the problems that arose.TERMINOLOGYThroughout this work, we use “DAO Units” in a broad sense - any time a DAO forms a smaller group of contributors within the DAO, with a distinct purp...
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Blog iconRnDAO
Jul 19
Why and How we SubDAO
This article presents the conclusions of a research project between RnDAO and Sobol. In this research, we attempt to define groups within DAOs- what we call DAO Units. We also explore the definitions used by members of a range of popular DAOs, determine their motivations and approaches in creating DAO Units, and identify a series of common challenges when setting up and operating different kinds of DAO Units. RnDAO is an innovation center funded by DAOs to serve DAOs, with a mission to empowe...
What is a DAO? Conceptual Foundations
Blog iconRnDAO
Jun 17
SummaryAt RnDAO, we delved into the question of 'What is a DAO’ and frame 5 conceptual lenses that enable us to leverage the existing body of research on coordination and organisations:The five lenses:🌐 DAOs as Organisational collectives **DAOs as multi-agent systems, with interconnected instances of decision-making, where agents attribute decisions to a collective entity (the DAO) and where declarations, statements, and references (i.e. speech acts) describe what the entity is or does....
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Blog iconRnDAO
May 14
Decentralising leadership: from monolithic to modular and polycentric
Why talk about leadership?Let's bring it back to the people. If you've ever been in an executive position, been an influential DAO member, or founded a new organisation, you'll likely viscerally know the weight of responsibility. There can be so much work, so much uncertainty and yet such a pressing need to make big, complex decisions, often with long-lasting consequences. It's exhilarating, but it's also exhausting if not downright nerve-wracking. Conversely, being i...
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Blog iconRnDAO
Jan 5
In Defense of Coin Voting
Coin Voting has got a lot of bad press recently. It has been criticised for aiding plutocracy and being vulnerable to attacks by large token holders (i.e. whale attacks). Less talked about, but probably more impactful is that Coin Voting also enables all token holders to participate in decisions, and more often than not, the token holders are not particularly known to the core team (a common result of attracting token holders through high APYs or other profit-oriented motives). In many DAOs, ...
Six Key Interactions for a Thriving DAO
Blog iconRnDAO
Dec 28
We spend most of our lives in teams and organisations. And anyone who’s ever led one has spent dozens if not hundreds of hours wondering: How do I make it great? What will enable us to do great work together and adapt quickly when a challenge comes our way? How do I keep the community happy and engaged? Historically, most advice on organisations has originated from observing 'good’ teams and contrasting them with ‘bad’ teams. Naturally, that approach leads to generalisations about how su...
From Purpose Statements to Guiding Questions
Blog iconRnDAO
Dec 28
At first glance, Purpose Statements are a great thing. They serve to articulate a company (or DAO’s) reason for being, beyond maximising profits for investors. But these seemingly innocuous positive statements are a double-edged sword, carrying the potential to enable megalomaniac tendencies, fanatic tunnel-vision and purpose-washing. Now, I don’t mean to demonise the Purpose Statement. If we take a quick detour into how Purpose Statements came to be, we’ll see they are but one step in the hi...
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Dec 24
Expertise as a Business Model
Web3 has brought a host of new possibilities for business model innovation, including commons-economies, meme-tokens, NFT-creators communities, and many more. This article explores how Web3 fundamentals could refresh a somewhat unusual model I discovered years ago and supercharge it. Let’s start with a Web2 example of an expertise-focused business model, and then we’ll go into how Web3 can improve upon it.Learning From The Past: Experimental Kitchens Are More Profitable Than RestaurantsI star...
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Dec 13
Minimum Viable Salaries for a fairer Web3
**This article represents my views exclusively, and should not be assumed to represent the views of any other team or organisation. A few friends and acquaintances have provided feedback, please attribute any genius to them and any lapses in thinking to me** In web3, bounties and grants have proliferated as reward mechanisms for contributors. This was partially due to both bounties and grants being relatively simple from a technical perspective: they are a one-off transfer. However, there cou...