All communities and organizations require some level of trust in order to properly function. Having trust within a group is what allows members to rely on each other, cooperate, and collaborate. But how do these groups actually build trust?

Communities and organizations typically have mechanisms that we call “trust frameworks”. These frameworks are what governs different community interactions, such as onboarding, membership, contributions, and acceptance of those contributions. Trust Frameworks can take many different forms; they can be unspoken norms or explicitly stated rules, documented processes or ethereal expectations, but most importantly they increase comfort and accountability within communities. Think about how the groups you’re a part of operate - what you needed to do in order to join, what traditions or rituals are observed, and how group activities are chosen, carried out, and reviewed. These are all instances of trust frameworks!

Having trust frameworks becomes even more important as communities and organizations grow. More members means more types of interactions between these members, which makes coordinating efforts more difficult. Having trust frameworks helps everyone to navigate these interactions, while establishing ways to confirm and guide contributions. Without these frameworks, communities and organizations can fall to conflict or chaos extremely quickly. Add the threat of bots and AI agents, and having robust trust frameworks are now more important than ever.

“Alright, that’s cool and all, but what’s your point?“

I’m getting to that! My point, dear esteemed and wonderful reader, is that at Govrn we’ve been thinking a lot about trust frameworks, especially in the area of community contributions. In addition to already providing bottom-up methods to manage contributions, we wanted to give communities more control over the acceptance of those contributions.

https://twitter.com/stefdelev/status/1651246527887597569?s=20

Verification Frameworks are trust frameworks for community contributions. They allow any community or organization on Govrn to create and manage their own requirements for which contributions are actually accepted into the community. This means that communities and orgs (if they want) can open themselves up to growth and more member interactions - and can do this without worrying about all of the difficulties, confusions, and chaos that comes with growth. Verification Frameworks lead to accountability at scale, and thus, trust at scale.

Also, since many communities using tech often end up getting locked into rigid requirements and rules, our frameworks are implemented in a way that is flexible and adaptable to your needs as you grow and change over time.

https://twitter.com/AaronSoskin/status/1654191705502126081?s=20

We’ll be building out multiple types of Verification Frameworks over time (let us know what you’d like to see!), but we’ve started off with a framework to accept contributions based on the number of attesters/attestations that they have. Simply put, this means a contribution would be accepted only once one or more people within the community (depending on the number set) have “co-signed” the contribution. Example below:

We’ve started with attestations since peer validation is an effective way to confirm that a contribution actually happened, especially when those peers have a reputation of their own. We’ll continue to update you as we add new Frameworks to the roster!

Now it’s your turn - visit govrn.app and check out these dynamic frameworks. Empower your communities and organizations, make more decisions together, embrace accountability, and create trust at scale.

During the DAO boom (2021) we saw a lot of groups come together around a specific objective and proclaim themselves as DAOs.

This eventually sparked many conversations around what is and isn't a DAO - one important quality being that there must be an actual on-chain deployment for a community to be truly considered a DAO, which of course is key for on-chain governance and treasury structures.

https://twitter.com/BryanPetes/status/1600923705504595970?s=20

Because of this, (and the bear market of course!), there is much more focus on building actual DAOs in a way that is sustainable and effective. This was the evolution that the space needed, and it's been excellent to see DAOs and DAO tools focusing on establishing this future.

However…

https://twitter.com/touchgrassppl/status/1638369063679172609?s=20

Seeing the excitement and fun exhibited by people contributing to treeDAO, helped me to remember something:

The reason why people kept forming random groups and calling them DAOs, was simply because it was fun and exciting. People want to be a part of something new and exciting, and I think it would be a mistake to lose that element of play.

This is where proto-DAOs come in. A proto-DAO is the middle-point between a loose community, and a full fledged DAO. Let's dive into this a bit more.

The biggest complaints I remember hearing weren’t that these fledgling groups formed in the first place, but that they formed without any plans to become real DAOs™. They weren't there to eventually deploy on-chain and build in governance, they were kinda just...there, using the name of DAO in vain, as it were.

Regardless, I believe we need more communities organizing overall (yes, even just to have fun!), and I think doubling down on the proto-DAO designation can serve an important purpose - it can be a perfect start for a community that isn't ready to be a DAO yet, but does want to slowly become one.

https://twitter.com/niran/status/1598808300837117962?s=20

Don't want to start off with a token or a treasury? Want to form a community but aren't ready to commit to a governance system? Not sure if the community is even strong enough to become a DAO? Make it a proto-DAO. Contribute now, figure the rest out later.

Given that they’re a midpoint, proto-DAOs should still operate with building blocks in mind. To me this looks like:

1. having a community that coalesces around a particular goal or action

2. having the contributions from that community be recorded in a way that everyone within the community can see and keep track of

#1 is how most organizations start anyway (bringing in people who care about a specific goal, and working together towards that goal), but #2 is also important: when the community does become a DAO, having the contributions recorded can open the door to things like retroactive funding as well as governance that can be built on top of those contributions, unlocking whole new types of community interactions.

It also allows you to follow how the community has operated and the types of work that the community has done over time - which creates more trust and understanding between members, better decision making within the community, and better coordination of the community’s goals and operations.

In other words, it helps the community to build out its ‘lore’ in real time.

And if your community eventually decides not to take the leap to becoming a full DAO, having an early record of the contributions means you can always return later and build on top of what was already done.

https://twitter.com/rafathebuilder/status/1641060393622593536?s=20

Proto-DAOs may not be full DAOs, but they’re still very powerful and we should support them. Whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, let’s spend more time bringing people together and helping them to organize into communities.

DAO tools should be seen as layers, not monoliths. They should be thought of as ‘these, and’ instead of ‘this, or’. They should not be one-stop-shop platforms that seek to be the only place where “DAO stuff“ happens. This leads to the formation of monoliths, which eventually puts us right back to the high platform centralization of Web2.

What we need to remember is that DAOs are extremely fluid. Different communities have different needs, and even a singular community may have very different needs throughout its lifecycle. Pushing them into monolithic platforms takes away their ability to move, change, and even exit over time.

Building the tools as layers within a stack allows these communities to shift and change over time, maybe adding or removing layers during different seasons/cycles, or switching a tool in one layer with another. At the end of the day, the communities should be in control, not the tools.

Instead of one platform trying to do everything and solve every problem (ie be every layer in the stack), tools should seek instead to solve one or two problems extremely well (ie focus on one layer in the stack) and then integrate with other tools that are solving very different problems in other layers. The integrations are key to filling in any gaps.

Of course, let’s not gloss over the fact that it can be difficult for communities to use multiple tools simultaneously. How do we make this easier and more seamless?

https://twitter.com/nelsontjordan/status/1635669946934894592?s=20

The answer largely lies in how the tools themselves interact with each other. Integrations should, of course, be seamless and easy to use: they should unlock a strong value-add without much friction for the user(s).

Beyond that, there’s vast opportunity for further stack-oriented behavior: creating collaborative content, documentation that explains in detail how the tools interact, and other real-time examples of tools working together in the wild (see tweet above).

If DAOs are networks that can connect and combine to create an ecology of composable communities, then the tools that they use should synergize in similar ways.

Let’s push to break down the silos, and let’s build more collaboratively.

Govrn is a community tool that’s focused on the contribution layer. By doing so, we can work amazingly with tools for other layers.

But the largest barrier to unlocking this power is that self-reporting your own work isn’t automatic, and requires a bit of a mental shift from what most are typically used to.

The most important thing to keep in mind is, you’re not self-reporting your contributions for a boss or manager, you’re doing it for yourself and your peers - that’s a drastically different kind of interaction, and one that actually builds your own personal autonomy. It also strengthens the trust within your community, and helps them to better understand what’s happening and what needs to be done.

Here’s an example of me recording this blog post as a contribution for Govrn, using the Govrn platform. Recording this contribution took just a few seconds! And now my whole squad can keep track of what’s being done in real time.

A number of communities have actually adopted these actions as part of their culture, by setting a specific time each week for group recording and attesting of contributions. These rituals build out the lore of the community in real time, and they help to reduce any hassle in having to do this task individually. It also helps to center the community around their work, which creates a widespread sense of pride and accomplishment.

Regardless, there’s a healthy balance between autonomy and convenience, and with Govrn we still want to make these autonomous actions as easy as possible to make. This is why we’re building out multiple integrations that would automate many of your contribution records. We already have integrations with discord (via our discord bot), Linear (a project management tool), and of course Avenue, with many more to come. Wherever work is being done, we want to integrate it into the Govrn contribution graph.

But try this all out for yourself! Record a contribution on Govrn today :)

If we consider a contribution in this context as: a unit of labor done by an individual for the sake of furthering the goals of a project or community, then contribution management is the use of tools and techniques to keep track of one’s contributions, making sure they’re recorded, surfaced, and (eventually) given value when necessary.

For those who want to build sustainable DAOs, contribution management is a key ingredient of your operations. Whether contributions happen via proposals, pods, or bounties, keeping track of what’s actually being done can be difficult. Keeping track in a way that isn’t fully top-down, but is still verifiable, is even harder.

What you don’t want in a DAO is one or two people having to run behind contributors to keep track of their work. What you do want is a system where contributors actually self-report what they do, with confirmation/verification from other contributors when necessary.

This results in a well-oiled organization that works in more of an autonomous, bottom-up fashion - with contributors much more involved in each other’s work, progress, and goals, rather than working in silos. If we want to build DAOs that don’t have to rely so strongly on core teams, contribution management is how we get there.

In addition to helping with coordination, contribution management is also useful for retroactive payments/funding. For many communities, funding may not be available at early stages, thus they may not be able to pay contributors until after a certain milestone or timeframe. In these cases, having easily accessible records of contributions, for all contributors, makes going back and providing payments incredibly easy.

Personal contributions are much more open and flexible. For individuals, contribution management can simply be for your own provenance - keeping note of important achievements or milestones over the years that you may not want to have to scroll through your social media to find, especially if you’re looking for it years later. This could be anything from “my first kickflip” or “my first fred again concert” all the way to “completed my doctorate” or “finally paid off my mortgage“. It’s been interesting to see people use Govrn for the DAOs and communities they’re part of, as well as for their own individual use. Some people even create their own personal DAO for this! Thinking autonomously opens the door to all kinds of fun.

Start managing your contributions today on Govrn!

Let’s look at one concrete unlock and one abstract unlock:

1. The Concrete - Recording contributions gives you insight into what’s actually happening in your community

https://twitter.com/eshita/status/1624071033111150594?s=20&t=2TkQgGhhoXLT1H-HDsuE5A

DAOs often make many organizational tradeoffs, making important things like accountability quite difficult. Of course, not only DAOs but many online communities have this issue as well. Since there’s often no “manager“ or “boss“, it falls on your peers or yourself to record and verify the work that is being done. If this verification doesn’t happen, the community is essentially blind - nobody knows what’s actually being done, it’s almost impossible to follow up on other contributors’ work, and multiple people may end up doing the same task. Also, without being able to verify, anyone can lie about what they did or didn’t do.

2. The Abstract - Recording contributions allows you to decipher the values and the culture of your community

https://twitter.com/rafathebuilder/status/1623707742501318659?s=20&t=sox6Y9LNN2EcpbvJIjp56g

What types of contributions does your community make the most? What types do you make the least? Who specifically makes them, and when? Do individuals tend to make the same kinds of contributions over and over or do they try a number of different things? How often do you all experiment? Are your contributions made solo or as a team? These learnings become even more apparent and actionable over time as your community evolves and builds out a full catalog of contributions.

The importance of all of this is also why at Govrn we’re doing in-house research on contribution taxonomies, to develop new understandings of how the cultures of communities are established and evolve over time. We’ll talk about this more in depth as we advance our findings!

Btw, you already know the drill. This is what we do at Govrn. Come level up your communities. Stop playin.

Memberships is our solution to onboarding contributors into your DAO, so that contributors can quickly and easily:

1. start recording their contributions, and

2. attribute those contributions to your DAO

Simply go to your Profile tab, scroll to ‘My DAOs’, and your communities will already be there for you!

We’ve included a dashboard for all of your DAOs, whether you’re a totally new contributor or you’re part of a founding team. Change settings, open your DAO Dashboard, tag your favorite DAOs, and more!

You can also create a new DAO profile on Govrn and add your contributors all at once! It’s extremely easy, and just takes a few clicks.

What can you do with your new DAO profile? You can name your DAO, add your contributors' wallet addresses, and hit Import - and you’re good to go!

You can also change the settings for the DAOs you create. You can add new members, set or change member roles if necessary, or change how the DAO is recognized on the platform.

Reducing chaos and increasing coordination, one contribution at a time. Try out Memberships today on Govrn!

Fortunately, that’s not the chaos case. In addition to empowering DAO contributors to own their own contributions, we also empower DAO core teams to effectively coordinate those contributions - mainly through our new DAO Dashboard feature.

DAO Dashboards provide an amazing bird’s-eye view of all the contributions that are attributed to your DAO.

The contributors still own their own work, but core teams can better understand the work that’s being done in the DAO - leading to less chaos and more coordination.

DAO Dashboards shows you:

1. A heatmap of the DAOs contributions, showing what was done on what day

2. A chart of the contributions by member

3. A chart of the contributions by type/category

4. All of the recent contributions in the DAO

You can also adjust these by timeframes (week, month, year, etc), and of course there’s even more to come!

When contributors push their contributions up to a DAO, the Dashboard opens the door to whole new ways of coordinating and directing that DAO, simply through the work that’s being done.

For example, if you see that certain types of contributions are happening more often than others, you can double down on those if they’re the most important. Alternatively, if certain important types of contributions are happening less often, newly onboarded contributors can be directed to focus on those types in order to fill the gaps.

DAOs are often inefficient, but they don’t have to be. Use DAO Dashboards to level up your coordination!

However, the proliferation of DAOs must come first and foremost from the proliferation of DAO mentality.

https://twitter.com/tommylower/status/1615383566967345153?s=20&t=pr4KLzbrkva3cdHYice7Vg

But what exactly is “DAO mentality”? What does it even mean to be a DAO native? Honestly, there are a number of things, but some of the most important are autonomy, agency, ownership, participation, and self-empowerment.

I could write all day about these attributes and the need for them to be taught, but let’s just talk real quick about what they mean in regards to work and the workplace.

https://twitter.com/stefdelev/status/1552688164011388928?s=20&t=TSAlzWEn4bPxBPouvGJqRQ

When you work under the scope of a company or corporation, your work is essentially owned by that company or corporation. In return, of course, you get a paycheck - but you have no claim to the work that was done, even if it came fully from your own efforts. You don’t own the means of production, or even the production itself.

DAOs change this relationship between worker and owner by blurring the lines between the two. In DAOs, often you can become the worker and the owner, because anyone with a stake in the DAO also has ownership of the work produced in it.

This relationship is significantly better than the previous relationship. But even then, there still is a gap between your work being owned by the DAO entity (and community) and your work being owned by *you*.

What’s the difference? Well, possibly not that much. But what if you leave the DAO? What if the DAO gets taken over by bad actors, or it simply dissolves? How much control over your work (and the record of your work) do you still have in these scenarios?

This is the true importance of Govrn for a DAO contributor. Record your own contributions, mint your own contributions, manage your own contributions.

You’ve heard of: “Not your keys, not your coins.”

Now we add: *“Not your records, not your work.”*

Explore Govrn today and create autonomy, ownership, and self-empowerment. And hit up @stefdelev on twitter if you want a full demo!

One governance model that we would love to see more in DAOs is what we call contribution-based governance, which simply prioritizes the contributions of contributors and participants over capital.

In Kei’s article ‘The Prehistory of DAOs’ (still a fave read), she talks about the similarities between DAOs and alternative governance structures such as cooperatives. These structures have been incredibly important historically because they allow coordination and organization mainly by empowering workers and involving them in decision-making. In the same way, we believe it’s essential for DAOs to empower contributors and participants in DAO governance, in order to ensure their success and impact.

Of course, this is much easier said than done. Challenges such as Sybil attacks, the difficulty of tracking and accounting for actual work done, and the lack of a taxonomy for DAO contributions, all pose significant obstacles.

One solution to this is for DAOs to use Govrn. Govrn is a contribution management tool that provides a way for DAO contributors to easily record (and categorize) their contributions, manage them, and even mint them on-chain (allowing true ownership of one’s own work). This helps to reduce the chaos in DAOs, as well as improving accountability.

Under the hood, Govrn is also building out a contribution graph that, when integrated with reputation and compensation tools, aims to pave the way for actual, reliable, and robust contribution-based governance in DAOs, which in turn will make DAOs more functional, equitable, and sustainable for all.

PS: If you want a deeper dive into this important topic, check out this talk at Dappcon ‘22!

Where we’ve been

So where have we been over the past six months?  At the end of last year, we learned something important.

We learned that a key piece of DAO Contributor Infrastructure was missing.

As we were building tools and pursuing contributor empowerment, we saw that contributors weren’t receiving fair recognition for their contributions.

Not only that, but even the knowledge and records of contributors’ contributions were being lost.  Contributors didn’t know what contributions they were making relative to the needs of the DAOs, and DAOs were unaware of the contributions that fully composed their DAO.

If a DAO is a schelling point for contributors to coordinate towards a goal, and nobody knows what those contributions are, then what is the DAO?

Interestingly, if the contributions were being recorded at all, those records were owned by the DAO. Thus:

Contributors weren’t able to own their own contributions.

At Govrn, we believe the power of the community is derived from the members that make it up.  We believe that the best way to empower the DAO is to empower the DAO Contributors.

A DAO should define itself as the aggregation of all of its members.  The members aren’t defined by “what the DAO is”.

DAOs should be defined by the actions we take, the relationships we make, and the conversations we have.  It’s the things we actually do, the rollup of all the contributions, that define what the DAO is.

We, all of us, define the DAO, the “DAO” doesn’t define us.

This has been, and continues to be, our key mission.  Empower DAOs by empowering the people, the contributors that make it up.

So we grabbed our favorite DAOs to work with, raised a round of funding (👀- more to come on this), ordered the pizza, ranch, a round of kombucha, and found ourselves back in the bazaar of our garage.

And let us tell you, it’s been an amazing 6 months.

What’s next

This brings us here.  While I’m excited, we’re taking a deep breath; we still have a long way to go.  Everything you’ve known about Govrn has been Govrn v0, and we’re ready to finally give you Govrn v1.

What is v1?  Well, it’s a whole next version from v0 😉.  But more importantly, it’s the next step in the Govrn journey.

This summer, we have something special coming your way, something we’re calling:

Hot DAO (Contributor) Summer

If last summer was Hot DAO Summer, then this summer is Hot DAO (Contributor) Summer (HDCS).  This summer, it’s all about you, the contributor.

I can’t wait to introduce more about HDCS soon.  It’s going to be a hot and heavy summer.  But these are always the best.

So for now get ready, relax, and sip that iced tea.  I hope we’ve piqued your interest and that you’re ready to go on this journey with us.

Because let me tell you, I see the sun rising on a new season.

And this summer, it’s going to be all about you.

🌞