Instead of being scared, concerned, or outraged, most just rolled their eyes with a telling 'not again' look on their faces. I was told that the aircraft on that route are the last ones to be replaced in the United fleet and slamming aircraft onto very short runways does the rest - making the Island Hopper a shaky lifeline for communities in the region.

There is so much to tell that it could fill hundreds of pages already, and perhaps someday it will, but this terrifying experience led to incredible events that highlight a perspective that is frequently overlooked in expert discourses on digital infrastructure.

Disembarking the aircraft in a rush, I forgot my notebook with approximately two months of field notes in the seat pocket. I only realised this two islands further and 1,600 km later, in Pohnpei. I immediately approached one of the flight attendants, who wrote a phone number for Guam United Baggage Services on a napkin and added an email address that might or might not work. Once I arrived on the Majuro Atoll, after about 24 hours between airports and aircraft, I called the number using a VoIP service. The connection was terrible, but they confirmed they had found my notebook.

Now, it was only a matter of obtaining it along my route. The solution the woman in Guam came up with was putting it on the next Island Hopper with a stop in Majuro, where I could retrieve it. At the airport the next day, I witnessed cooler after cooler of fresh fish for family members in the US being wrapped in dedicated United bags by passengers boarding UA133. The sheer amazement at that scene distracted me from the fact that the electronic tag number for my notebook did not get me very far.

After four hours of waiting, only one box addressed to the United supervisor in Majuro remained. Once opened, it revealed my notebook with months of work inside. If it hadn't been for the cabin crew (who stayed at the same hotel in Majuro), the woman working at United Baggage Services in Guam, the ground staff in Majuro, and the fact that they knew each other, I would never have been able to retrieve my notebook. The online form I filled in with United still states that my item could not be found.

This made me realise that states like the RMI can invest billions of dollars into telecom towers only for them to be eaten away by the salt in the air; airlines can rotate new aircraft in to be slammed on short runways; and visitors can spend big on VoIP credits, but the network of people is what makes these conventional infrastructures work.

In this sense, the Western perspective on (digital) infrastructure misses the point: outside of its limited regional context, the idea of substituting interpersonal networks with impersonal data networks through the development of infrastructures does not work. Instead, it is the relational infrastructure that is the bedrock, which digital infrastructures must accommodate, build upon, and learn from.

As the current President of the RMI, Hilda C. Heine, wrote in 2001 regarding education:

"To critically evaluate Pacific education systems, we have to decide on criteria to judge them by. That is, let us develop our own and create some regional standards, and integrate Western standards where appropriate. Western standards are based on vastly different lives and expectations and resource levels; let us define our own" (Heine, 2021, p. 127).

Lessons learned and RAID staked.

After a trialling Rite of Moloch in a closed alpha one year ago, the latest onboarding cohort at RaidGuild Season VI granted us the opportunity to launch ROM as a closed beta. We built an app where everyone, who successfully participated in the cohort can claim back their funds, but lessons learned are plenty. It is hard for DAOs to manage its members.

The launch of ROM proved this once again. While we are building ROM to bring ownership to individual contributors, we lost valuable time to give cohort members pretext due to lacking ownership of the decision which logo to use for the cohort. This caveat gave us a bumpy launch and highlighted once again the raison d’être for ROM and is a great start to dive into the details of our launch.

Defining responsibilities is easy if you are in the same line of work, in the same office, and can split tasks. This undertaking becomes increasingly difficult, the fewer touch points are between collaborators. Now the launch of ROM required the ROM team to align with the program managers of Season VI at RaidGuild and the participants of Cohort Season VI DAO.

We learned that DAOing needs to be learned and ROM, could have been part of this educational journey. This would have led to a timelier deployment and a proper introduction to ROM for its users. As ROM has interfaces that are Web2-ready, such as the image hosting, many variables had to be accounted for by administrators. We then accidentally deployed the cohort twice and lost one cohort member, who staked in the deprecated cohort due to the permissionless nature of ROM.

If ROM natively supported single member cohorts or a fast-tracked cohort deployment, ROM could have been a way to signal responsibilities rather than distributing tasks. Our low barriers to entry for administrators and participants produced a coordination failure and early users were left confused. In the future, we should smoothen launch cycles and focus on the core USP of bringing clear instructions for collaboration to DAO contributors. It is not just about a logo, but the entire lifecycle management needs to be planned and owned. Thus, administrators may need to be introduced prior to the actual deployment.

We then asked ourselves who are the individuals and entities owning the process behind ROM. We made the experience that ROM was not configured to allow tributes to DAOHaus v.3 DAOs, because previously no DAO in charge of allowing our Shaman Manager contracts at ROM used tributes. We were left with an undeployable cohort unless we disabled the Shaman functionality through the selector on the frontend. This meant removing the option to render Season VI’s ROM cohort as single use, which limited the scope of our beta launch. To go ahead with the deployment itself we weighted into the notion that even the Season VI DAO may only be temporary. Despite the delays and unclear responsibilities ROM went live and participants started staking.

With the cohort coming to an end, it becomes clear that ownership implemented through an integration with DAOHaus may not suffice to deploy ROM in multifaceted use cases. Furthermore, the chasm between cohort administrators’ actions and a formalised organisational structure of DAOs creates uncertainty because ROM deployments become subject to principal-agent dilemmas and information asymmetry. In the next iteration, success criteria must be extended beyond DAOHaus shares to provide users with greater flexibility and enable ROM deployments on other EVM-compatible networks.

WEI is one of the foundational variables of programming in Solidity, yet it produces friction for frontend development and users, if not abstracted away properly. This has caused our beta launch participants to flag a couple of UX issues, where WEI was displayed on the frontend and inputs where inconsistently requiring WEI and unit amounts to be inserted. Hence, we had to patch alignment bugs and faulty input descriptors in a hot fix. We could have avoided the tensions by more thoroughly quality testing the application ahead of launch, however, our thorough alignment with agile development enabled us to save cost and improve the application mid-launch.

It is still unfortunate that these issues negatively impacted user experience, where even small shortcomings like the need to prompt a hard refresh between asset approval and staking caused unnecessary friction. With a whitelabel interface on the roadmap, we better get UX right in the near-term future.

What is next then for ROM? ROM ought to find market traction and the product-market fit must be validated. This prompts us to work on additional features, such as extending success criteria for reclaiming stakes. Additionally, we are evaluating the possibilities to make ROM available on other networks to maximise our market exposure. These strategic extensions are coupled with work to improve the user experience, namely, whitelabelling ROM for better accessibility. Lastly, we obviously must fix miscellaneous bugs that were surfaced during launch and improve the signalling around the management fee ROM collects for providing the service.

Overall, our beta launch was a success and taught us valuable lessons for planned development. Our team has conducted a retrospective and an updated version of the contracts is deployed shortly. We are looking optimistically enthusiastic in the future and are determined to bring ROM to the next level.

DAOs fail at onboarding, but why?

Why do DAOs fail at onboarding new contributors and retaining the talent? I believe there are two major factors involved, which Rite of Moloch (RoM) offers a solution to. Firstly, DAO work remains volatile and unstable, making it difficult for DAOs to offer motivated contributors the financial stability they are looking for. Individuals move on, engage in multiple communities at the same time, or under deliver. These unreliable contributor relations the reinforce the first problem. Lacking stability causes misalignment and a vicious race to the bottom has begun.

The corporate world has solved these issues through the creation of human resources (HR) departments, which have the power to penalise employees or let them go. DAOs, however, do not have a stable core or strong punitive measures at their discretion. Excluding a DAO contributor would equate to forcing a shareholder of a company to sell their shares. Doing so at scale is just not sustainable.

Meanwhile, the notion of corporate HR is not human-centric and an institution Web3 actively works on leaving behind. At Raid Guild we strive to show dedication to recent joiners, but expect the same amount of effort and alignment in return. For this reason we have built for ourselves and your DAO the application, why you will not need HR. RoM is a staking solution, which incentivises contributors to make achievable commitments and deliver on them.

Any DAO can use RoM to deploy a cohort, where participants lock an amount of tokens towards a defined goal. If a set of conditions is met and the staking period did not lapse, successful participants can reclaim their stake. Otherwise cohort administrators can slash participants’ funds to the benefit of the DAO. Hence, the DAO is incentivised to define goals that are measurable and achievable because otherwise no one would ever stake funds. Individuals now have financial alignment to a cause they choose, while completing tasks.

RoM enables contributors and DAOs to limit their downside. Hence, contributor onboarding is probably the most obvious use case, but there are more. If you are a service DAO, your name depends on the reliability of your contributors of finishing client deliverables timely and in expected quality. With RoM, contributors working for your DAO’s clients can now be prompted to stake a bond that is only released after a permissible delivery took place. Through such bond, defrauding clients, teams, or your DAO are sufficiently mitigated.

The same logic can be applied to internal DAO infrastructure projects. In particular, we have explored possibilities to connect gamified decision making with RoM-staking. When a DAO needs to decide on how to organise or which tools to build, members can use JokeDAO to vote for a solution. We have discussed this flow with @seanmc_eth and @davidphelps at JokeDAO and consider connecting the dots in the next iteration of RoM - HR for DAOs. Our first version is live on Vercel and can be accessed here. If you have questions, or would like to receive assistance in setting up RoM for your DAO, please reach out to @b3nedictvs on Twitter or come visit us on our Discord.

Guilds are not a new concept, but were revived as forms of organisation to accommodate for the market conditions in an emergent Web3. To navigate the space and eventually become a member to one of the many decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) you have to be specific and stick to your playbook. To help you start your journey, I have compiled a short guide that outlines three key steps for you to maximise your chance of success. By recursing to features of historic guilds, your path from research over discovery to engagement is explained in non-technical terms. The path described in this article lends itself credibility from sharing my experience of starting as an apprentice at Raid Guild.

When you first start out researching DAOs and choosing which one is worth applying for, you will be overwhelmed by chats on Discord you are unable to follow. It feels like being thrown half way into a conversation of people you do not know and who are not showing their faces. Opposed to joining a thread on Reddit, you are left without a heading or question. Before you even start engaging, you must have read some documentation the DAO provide, followed one or more members on social media, and most importantly not be afraid to ask important but redundant questions. You may be asking yourself how you ever will get a foot in the door. This article addresses what it takes for you to make a difference in a DAO.

After I followed the best practices and reached out to about five DAOs I was interested in joining, I received emails like the one below. Somehow I convinced myself that Web3 is not like the corporate world. It turns out that in the decentralised web, incumbents’ reputation counts just as much. Engagement and commitment are not enough to get yourself in.

You have either to prove yourself in an onboarding process, have something to show for, or both. Yet, you should not be discouraged by a few negative responses. Try and use this experience to build a small portfolio that showcases who you are and where your strengths lay. Joining a DAO should not be about producing a result. You grow in the process and learn about the purpose that drove you into Web3.

On my journey I discovered DAO aggregators, such as DAO Directory. These are a good start to explore various communities, in which you might be interested. Use it to organise your search for documentation, or operating principles. Yet, you should not solely rely on desk research. The most important part is to get involved and immersive yourself. For example, Raid Guild, where I am currently serving as an apprentice, redirects most incoming applicants to a standardised application form. While it is good practice to fill it out and submit it, when I joined Raid Guild’s Discord a community manager welcomed me. I responded with a short introduction and statement of purpose, which you should think of as a 160 character bio on Twitter. After that it was a matter of days until I became an apprentice.

1. Scrape your social media and see who in your network is a member of a DAO.

2. If you do not have any connections in Web3, go to DAOHaus and see which DAOs you might like.

3. Try to find medium sized DAOs with onboarding programs and manageable sizes of their Discord communities.

4. Join their Discord and follow the conversations for a week or two.

5. In the meantime read their documentation, Github repositories, and Twitter.

6. Apply through their formal onboarding channels.

7. Pivot with an introduction on Discord and evaluate the responses.

8. Make a decision. After all, it is you choosing where to best allocate your time.

You may question the purpose of this article because it could seem more complicated than it actually is. The truth is, however, I had help by a great individual, who I have met face-to-face. In our remote first, work from home world with virtual workspaces, meeting a person and having a conversation matter heaps. Remember that in most Web3 community servers on Discord almost everyone uses nicknames and forming personal connections becomes difficult.

If you were lucky and had the chance to attend soft skill trainings in graduate school or the corporate world, you know how overemphasised networking is. It does not need to be a stiff and artificial encounter. Instead, just try to find someone, who you bond with because you are sharing interests or have problems you can help each other solve. It does not need to be in the Zoom call or breakout session the organiser set up for you, nor do you have to have this conversation right away at an on-site conference. You can choose the place, conferencing software, or medium both of you feel the most comfortable with, but have this conversation.

Without having met my now fellow apprentice at the RxC Conference 2022, I would not have ended up diving down the Raid Guild rabbit hole. I am thankful for being able to make these encounters. The best thing about participating at such events is that most people show their faces there and you can get a deeper understanding of you are talking to. In short, get yourself out there. Personal encounters matter in the age of the meta verse just as much as they did before.

After you attended some conferences online or offline, you will have made interesting finds, generated new ideas for blog posts, learned something, and made meaningful connections. Once you have gotten to this point, it is important to define your goals and build your reputation. You create a track record by being accountable, as well as engage in discussions and selected projects. To maximise your impact and keep your focus try to limit yourself to two projects, at most. Web3 has seen many contributors getting lost by moving from one ‘big thing’ to the next, without creating sustainable relationships. I have chosen Raid Guild as a project I would like to engage with and became an apprentice.

Raid Guild is a community of loosely affiliated freelancers and builders, who gave themselves a governance structure to set a minimum price for their services and redistribute excess profits to the community as a club good. Raid Guild’s branding follows a World of Warcraft theme, which is present throughout the user journeys of members, apprentices, and clients. While it sets the scene for most interactions within the DAO, it is not overly intrusive or deterministic. It only gives a credible account of the state of the economy in Web3.

More specifically, guilds as organisational structures match the state of the Web3 economy. It is an emerging market akin to the economies in the early stages of modern capitalism, when markets were not yet bureaucratically regulated. Guilds formed in late medieval Europe to legitimise the social status, protect against free market competition, and increase profits of its members [1]. Hence, Raid Guild lends its members a reputation that allow them to charge a surplus, a portion of which is accumulated as club good. The limited access to financial means and knowhow, then, can be used to reinforce the guild's good standing, finances its market infrastructure and attracts new members who pay for accessing the good [2].

When looking at Web3 through the lens of sociology and economics, it appears to be not just any other emerging economy. Indeed with its guilds, DAOs, or tokens similar to early banknotes, Web3 mixes organisational principles from several epochs of capitalism. it gave reason for inviting a social scientist to the well known podcast The Scoop for cover the significance of crypto-asset adoption. Hence, ecosystems or economies around organisations like Raid Guild are a sandbox for society to concurrently experiment with different modes for the facilitation of trade.

Many of the Origin Stories of Raid Guild centre around the theme of organisation, adding value, and greater societal questions. In the late middle ages and early modern period guilds did not form on centralised order, rather the organisational structure had established itself in many different cities. Today guilds are considered one of the constituting elements of European cities of this time [1]. They not only denominated an emerging class of bourgeoisie, but also integrated into a larger socio-demographic structure. During that time societies were organised through monarchy with backing from the Catholic Church. In todays terms, think of Satoshi Nakamoto as a god like figure, crypto-whales to wield monarchic wealth, and members of guilds as entrepreneurs.

For the last group, DAOHaus provides a framework to deploy guilds. It functions as a platform where you can build a governance structure for the collective you aim to organise within the Web3 ecosystem, without being a seasoned Web3 developer. In medieval terms, you can build a guild without having to build an entire city around it. Yet, just like five hundred years ago, the general structure remains constant. For this reason you can find many organisations on DAOHaus, even one where you belong.

[1] Weber, M. (2000). Die Stadt. MWS I/22-5. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr

[2] Blum, U. (2017). Grundlagen der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Boston, MA: De Gruyter Oldenbourg.

In 2017 at an organic farm, I first heard about Ethereum. It took me three years until I bought my first coins at Binance and until 2020 to finally interact with a smart contract outside the walled gardens of centralised exchanges. I was writing up my bachelor’s thesis and had just started researching neoliberalism. The political stances of liberalism and its purest configuration as libertarianism led me to ‘Bitcoin and beyond’. I started reading whitepapers, blogs, academic literature only to understand what Web3 was all about, but I have not spoken to a single member of the space.

When everyone is just speaking of the space, it suggests that Web3 is one homogeneous mass of individuals. It worsened the feeling of otherness as an outsider and contributed to my understanding of Web3 as a small group of libertarians, who are neither open nor welcoming. Indeed, I just wanted to learn more about communities around cryptocurrencies, because I was interested in their social dynamics. Holding some ‘crypto’ was only the first step and not the reason for me wanting to get involved.

I have tried to explain my interest to people outside of Web3, but too often I am left with long faces. It might be that I am not doing a great job of abstracting from terms like DAO or token, to convey my interest in new modes of organisation and an all-encompassing digitalised way of life. The truth is, however, describing Web3 to be like an aggregate of cooperatives or being employed in a start up only adds to the confusion. These descriptions do not capture the decentralised web well and remain crude approximations.

After not being able to officially join a DAO, or finding friends in the space, I decided to close in on Web3 through research. A practice that makes me feel comfortable, because I am familiar with it, and it lets me interpret the unknown. When I dedicated my master’s thesis to researching crypto-assets, I finally was able to stick a label on my interest for those outside of Web3. An obscure hobby finally became a legitimate activity because it now was the subject of my studies and a cornerstone to earning a recognised academic award.

The point of enrolling in a school or to a university is that you have a journey, a learning curve ahead of you. To get accepted in the first place might be a binary decision based on your past merits and your performance in the motivational letter, but you do not have to submit your final dissertation upon application. Similarly, a hiring manager does not expect you to already perform the job you are applying for. Even in business you build a minimum viable product to gauge the market before you invest in a factory.

Web3 has a problem, then, because it over gamifies its appearance and loses growth through friction by excluding actors that economically cannot rely on a dominant position. Game theory efficiently limits access, yet, who are DAOs for ,when they cater only to those who are able to found a company instead?

Those with economic capital can invest their time to network or study, which increases their social capital and let them form cultural capital too. Personally, I would have loved to join a DAO to strike a compromise between an academic career and being out in the open, where I would be working freely based on contracts. While Web3 is all about ‘smart’ contracts, it seems ‘builders’ have forgotten that contracts are made ahead of delivery. Economies do not work the other way around.