1. Terminology: A lot of the terminology around DAOs is still inconsistent and open to interpretation. and best practises around how to run and govern a Decentralized Autonomous Organization are still being formed.

2. More than tech: The concept of democratised or decentralised organisations requires much more than technical understanding. To grasp the magnitude, we need to begin to rethink how organisations operate and peel back some of the fundamentals around ownership, participation, hierarchy and pretty much anything that can be classed as an organisational structure.

3. Yoda or Vader?: There could be a pretty thin line between utopia and dystopia around how these things could develop. We should all think like Yoda not Vader on this one.

   I will make some analysis / commentary on the above or if you are that way inclined, just scroll to the bottom of the entry to look at some memes that try to explain the same concepts :-)

   Terminology

   Way back in 2014 Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, college drop out and ETH billionaire, tackled some definitions:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/

Vitalik outlines the differences between Decentralized Applications (DA - although referred to today as dapps), Decentralized Organizations (DO) and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (along with other concepts).

To paraphrase and simplify for the lazy amongst us:

Decentralized Applications

“a decentralized application has an unbounded number of participants on all sides of the market. Second, a decentralized application need not be necessarily financial.”

An example of a decentralised application most of us are familiar with are the peer to peer file sharing services e.g. BitTorrent

Decentralized Organizations

To provide a comparison point for “DO’s”, Vitalik goes on to baseline a typical mainstream organisation with shareholders, leaders, employees and a hierarchical set of norms that govern operation. Then:

“The idea of a decentralized organization takes the same concept of an organization, and decentralizes it. Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain.”

For him a decentralized organization is basically a regular org with a blockchain as the ledger of record for all value and property transactions.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

“The ideal of a decentralized autonomous organization is easy to describe: it is an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do……The obvious difference between a DO and a DAO, and the one inherent in the language, is the word “autonomous”; that is, in a DO the humans are the ones making the decisions, and a DAO is something that, in some fashion, makes decisions for itself.”

For visual learners:

More than just tech

https://twitter.com/chaserchapman/status/1504176953045180420?s=20&t=7_oBdii2220pVEFI_tGrTQ

The lack of a firm definition and the fact that there are no blueprints or best practises to running a DAO yet, dictates an environment of experimentation and LEAN startup style learning cycles.

Rapidly, service providers are growing to “enable” DAOs to function. It will be fascinating to see how this ecosystem evolves. From Corbin Page:

Wonder is one of just many startups putting some structure and definitions around the operation of DAOs.

https://www.wonderverse.xyz/

https://twitter.com/wonderverse_xyz/status/1507360408042102788?s=20&t=7_oBdii2220pVEFI_tGrTQ

The Mckinsey of Web3? (probably much better than Mckinsey themselves…)

https://www.banklessconsulting.com/

Utopia or Dystopia?

This is a big meaty topic and probably should have it’s own blog and insights from those deeper in the space (Chauncey - looking forward to our catch up!)

OK ….. The Memes

The end until next time!

crowdfund://0x953cC6C00C04A0Dfb12150550F6dB32F4E4D2bc5?features=

With that in mind, and in response to the feedback on the first blog……

Here are some of the pieces of information that helped me personally embark on this journey and may help you if you choose to experiment too.

What is the blockchain?

https://medium.com/the-mission/a-simple-explanation-on-how-blockchain-works-e52f75da6e9a

Courtesy of @she256 via Li Jin, a great introduction to blockchain, crypto, consensus, Bitcoin, Ethereum and use cases.:

https://she256.org/guide/

https://she256.org/uploads/beginnersGuide.pdf

Smart contracts are critical to be understood too:

https://cointelegraph.com/ethereum-for-beginners/what-are-smart-contracts-a-beginners-guide-to-automated-agreements

NFTs

You will have heard a lot about NFTs or Non-Fungible-Tokens:

Overview of WTF these are, kudos to mamoria.eth:

https://twitter.com/mohitmamoria/status/1434916822663385090?s=20&t=didvVcWSEuKoRBnrlKhfag

Deeper dives:

https://opensea.io/blog/guides/non-fungible-tokens/

https://linda.mirror.xyz/df649d61efb92c910464a4e74ae213c4cab150b9cbcc4b7fb6090fc77881a95d

Web 3:

as a reminder from the first blog:

https://twitter.com/Patrick_Aloisio/status/1498697339543769092

For a brilliantly curated and signposted, deeper dive into Web3 for non-technical folks:

https://twitter.com/ljin18/status/1479111931977867275

OK, enough with the reading - how do I start to do something here?

Some things you can do to begin the practical learning, that will provide the foundation for going further in the future:

1. Get a Wallet - For ease of use and compatibility, many use MetaMask (it has an extension for the main browsers and allows you to connect your wallet to web3 services and sites. A quick guide here. What ever you do, keep a physical copy of your recovery seed and keep it very secure. If you lose this phrase you will not be able to access your wallet.

2. Buy some crypto currency. Something like Coinbase is pretty user friendly for us that are new in the space. The most utility will be found with the ETH coin which is the token used on the Ethereum blockchain. This is not a recommendation to start crypto currency trading. You will however likely need a small amount of ETH to be able to mint NFTs, buy NFTs, ENS domain names, etc..

3. Play around with NFTs. You can mint one (here is a test I did - I minted a picture I took of a crab at Lisbon Aquarium), buy them, or even sell them…. opensea.io is the leading marketplace here.

   Do all of this at your own discretion / risk

For those getting seriously curious:

https://a16z.com/crypto-startup-school/

has been recommended by experts in the industry to get started in the crypto/web3 sector.

If like me, you like to try to sprint before you can crawl, why not apply to support a crypto startup with your non-technical skills here:

https://variant.fund/contact/talent

Speaking for myself, this is very much a “new and complex” space. My intent is to share my journey in this blog. This will include my learnings, experiences, failures and (hopefully!) successes.

An experiment. Can a non-coder, in early 2022, get started in this space?

I am not a software developer. I have dabbled in blockchain and have a base understanding but am certainly not technical in this area. I am a curious explorer of no-code and low-code tech as well as AI.

I know enough to have created a wallet, procured a “.eth” domain and have minted an NFT (some of the basics you may also need if you are to follow this path - more to come on those).

I will be looking to see if I can “summon”, configure, and run a DAO without a single line of code being written.

Why am experimenting with this topic?

During the last 18 months, I have been working on a deep research project, which is addressing how we could create a more democratised world within a 30-to-50-year time horizon. Using the abstract concepts of democratised design, development, and deployment I have uncovered many potential trends, scenarios, technologies, and ecosystems that could play a role in how we live, consume, support each other, move, and build communities to distribute opportunity more equally.

DAOs!

My work over the last years has led me down a thousand different paths. One noteworthy trend is the use of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organisations) to democratise the reward for contribution to projects.

My current (clumsy) interpretation of DAO’s is to think of them as a digital co-op to enable collaboration and fairly distribute value created in a product / service / anything, in proportion to the contributions of the individuals involved.

Some more informed and experienced definitions can be found here:

https://www.producthunt.com/stories/a-beginner-s-guide-to-daos?ref=hpfeed&utm_source=pocket_mylist

https://www.smallbizlabs.com/2021/11/what-are-daos-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-and-why-you-should-care.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist

Isn’t this just for blockchain / Web3?

Beyond the evolution of Web3 and mainstream adoption of blockchain tech, what we learn from the early phases of development of DAO’s has the potential to significantly disrupt and redefine:

• Innovation

• IP

• Business models

• Employment

• Reward

• Social mobility

• Geographic access to opportunity

• and many more aspects

One paradox right now is that access to the creation of and participation in DAO’s is still in its infancy of decentralisation. There is incredible work being done to address this, however the root of this concept is firmly planted in the blockchain development space.

As such DAOs have the unintended consequence of being (arguably) exclusively accessible to that community. [Just for context, this is being written early March 2022, with the acknowledgement that the number of participants in DAOs is ~1 million].

What do I hope to achieve?

I have some initial goals:

1. Learn and share as much as I can about the actual deployment of a DAO:

2. Meet and build with new and passionate people:

3. Start a DAO with collaborators on my current project, attract new collaborators and accelerate time to market.

Hope to have you with me on this journey!