Orca Protocol is rebranding to Metropolis and opening up pod beta access to a select group of DAOs.

This rebrand is to match our identity to what we see as the most promising potential for DAOs — a rich landscape of interconnected and interdependent organizations — a Metropolis.

To learn more, read the full announcement on the Metropolis Mirror.

Please visit our new site metropolis.space and @0xMetropolis on twitter.

This – in a nutshell – is the evolutionary organization thesis.

Premature optimization is a sin when it comes to building software and it’s the best way to stunt learning and growth in DAOs.

The Risks of Premature Optimization

Premature optimization isn’t just expensive up-front, it’s also costly in the long run. When you design systems that try to anticipate how complex organizations will act, you make a set of assumptions. Some of those assumptions will be correct, and some will be wrong.

Ultimately, it’s the constant testing of those assumptions that allow systems to evolve into sophisticated, well-oiled machines.

And so, when you prematurely optimize DAOs, you end up with a system that’s often anticipating the wrong problems and thus creating complicated solutions to address problems the DAO does not yet have. This anticipation and problem-solving introduces new sets of assumptions into a system.

When you introduce more assumptions, it becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint why a system is failing – is it because of assumption A or assumption B? The more assumptions you have, the harder it is to figure out which assumptions are wrong and which are right.

So why do we prematurely optimize?

Fear of failure. We think if we anticipate problems now, we can design our way out of those challenges.

But often the opposite is true. In fact, it is this fear of failure that costs time and money in the long-run, as we lose the data and learnings that come from constantly testing assumptions (learning which assumptions are wrong and which are right).

The Evolutionary Organization

The key to building complex systems is not designing complexity from the start. Instead, it’s about building simple systems, allowing them to fail, and iterating on those systems based on what works and what does not work.

This is Gall’s Law in action.

One important note: in these systems, failure isn’t just inevitable – it’s actually helpful. By constantly testing assumptions and maximizing learning, these systems become evolutionary organizations.

Flexibility

But evolutionary organizations don’t just optimize for learning – they also optimize for flexibility. Flexible systems allow organizations to leverage learnings and make incremental improvements (constantly testing assumptions!).

When it comes to DAOs (and anything on-chain for that matter), flexibility is rarely designed into systems.

But it really should be.

Modularity is the name of the game in this regard. Unlike monolithic DAO implementations, modular DAO implementations allow for quick testing and iterations, which ultimately allow organizations to evolve quickly and efficiently.

Often when we think about flexibility in systems design, it comes with trade-offs – typically around things like security. But flexibility doesn’t necessarily require sacrificing security. Using tools like pods, DAOs can build modular systems, which maintain security at the local pod level, while enabling flexibility at the DAO level.

Becoming Evolutionary

So you want to build an evolutionary organization, anon?

Start simple. Stop trying to design the most sophisticated governance system. Start with something simple and evolve from there.

Fail intentionally. Make assumptions. Test those assumptions. Repeat.

Build modular. Think about your organization as a car. You can swap out parts and it’ll still run just fine.

Pod-pilled? Ready to go modular? Well you’re in luck – we’ve got some big announcements coming up. Follow us on Twitter to stay updated on all things pods.

Big thanks to Jon Hillis, Cam, Richie Bonilla, Chalice Stroebe, Caryn and Adrian Ricardo for a wonderful chat on Gall’s Law and constant evolution in DAOs. And thanks to Julia Rosenberg and frogmonkee for endless DAO conversations and always giving the best feedback.

While there has been a push to atomize work through bounties and other ways of defining and compensating work, the fact remains: DAOs are groups of humans coordinating together to solve problems.

We see this through the emergence of workstreams, working groups, guilds, or whatever else you choose to call the small teams that make up almost every DAO.

Pods 101

At Orca, we use a singular name for these different types of teams – pods. These pods are usually governed by token holders, delegating responsibility and imbuing pods with authority to enact a certain mandate, whether that be to manage a grants program, build a product, control marketing channels, manage security, etc.

We’ve seen this pattern play out time and time again – Yearn, BanklessDAO, TribeDAO, ENS, MakerDAO, etc. It’s the dominant model for creating teams, empowered by token holders.

That’s why we built Orca Protocol, a way for DAOs to easily spin up working units while managing them through on-chain governance.

Technically, pods are a lightweight permissions layer around a Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallet, used to create more flexible and composable working units. Access to a pod is authorized through membership NFTs. These NFTs act like office keycards. When you swipe into your office, your keycard is validated against a set of permissions to see whether or not you have access. Changing key cards (adding new members or revoking access) is as simple as updating office access permissions.

Pods create on-chain structures, ensuring DAOs can benefit from the security, permissions, and autonomy of being on-chain while maintaining the flexibility of small working units. You can learn more about pods here.

Benefits of Pods

But why would an organization want to use pods?

1) Give the right people the right type of autonomy

Pods give autonomy to the most fundamental unit of work happening in DAOs – groups of people focused on directed tasks. Autonomy in this context could mean control of funds, governing rights, or even smart contract permissions. Pods need autonomy to operate, otherwise, they risk getting stuck in a bureaucratic maze asking for permission to perform even the most basic tasks.

Example: TribeDAO gives certain pods control over specific protocol features. This means when protocol-level changes need to be made, the right people have the autonomy to make those changes without requiring DAO-wide votes or benevolently trusting a small group of people to make those changes. Instead, pods introduce the needed accountability systems for these groups of people – without forcing them to trade off their autonomy. Read more about TribeDAO’s pod implementation here.

2) Create flexible, on-chain structures

Part of what makes DAOs unique is their ability to leverage on-chain structures to create and scale bespoke organizational structures rather than managing those structures without on-chain activity. But putting structures on-chain tends to create a level of inflexibility – often DAOs are forced to create complex and opinionated mechanisms for things like voting, exiting, membership, etc.

While opinionated structures can be helpful, the inflexibility they introduce can be a challenge as DAOs evolve and change. Different stages, market conditions, etc can all introduce new variables in a DAO’s organizational structures.

Pods give DAOs the benefits of being on-chain, while also creating incredibly modular structures that can be shaped, shifted, and re-imagined without breaking the entire system. These pods can relate to each other in a variety of ways, allowing for sophisticated coordination between them. For example, a contract can manage members, or you could have another pod – where members are elected by token holders – managing members.

This combination of dynamic structure with cryptographically-secure assurances fundamentally comes down to balancing trustware and socialware. The pod-sibilities are endless!

Example: ENS first implemented pods with existing workstreams. After a season of experimentation, they decided that the existing structure didn’t fit the needs of the organization. Typically, this type of change in structure would require a significant rehaul of DAO tooling. But because pods are modular structures that are intended to evolve, the required changes were lightweight and structurally compatible with existing tooling.

3) Make your DAO consumable by people and tools

Understanding who is working on what, which groups exist, and where work is getting done in a DAO is not easy. There’s no design language for understanding the organizational structures of a DAO.

While a person might be able to figure this out by poking around in a Discord, DAO tooling requires someone to act as an oracle, telling it which people are doing the work. This means a lot of configuration and space for errors.

Because pods are on-chain and membership is granted via an NFT, they are consumable by any tool that reads on-chain data. For example, DAO tools can simply read pod structures and relationships to do things like map an organization, identify key members, understand token streams, and more. Pod consumption also applies to web3 social networks, defi protocols, and other products that leverage relational graphs of addresses.

Example: If a group wants to do a Coordinape allocation, they would typically need to select which people to bring into the circle for that epoch. If a DAO uses pods, Coordinape can simply consume pods and immediately have the exact blueprint of who works with who and where work is being done. This could mean automatically spinning up Coordinape circles that are updated with active pod members every epoch.

Note: Coordinape does not have an active integration with pods… yet. 😉 You can read about our existing integrations (like Parcel) and follow our upcoming integration announcements here.

4) People come and go, but pods are forever

DAOs are like the Ship of Theseus. If you’ve built a strong organization, it shouldn’t matter who comes and goes – the organization is still the organization. Pods make this true on-chain.

Pods give atomic groups the power that comes with a multi-sig (including asset ownership, voting power, the ability to perform different actions on-chain, etc), while also creating structures to make sure the right people are holding that power. That means “replacing boards” (members) on the “ship” (DAO) is much less painful.

People come and go, pods are the container that lasts.

Example: FireEyes uses pods for metagovernance delegation – which means people delegating to FireEyes are not delegating their votes to an EOA or even a multi-sig with no clear structures for signer management. Instead, people are delegating votes to a pod with clear membership structures – so delegators don’t need to worry about who is on a pod or how membership is managed, it’s all visible on-chain. Read more about the role of pods in metagovernance and how FireEyes uses pods for metagovernance delegation here.

Gimme the pods

Have we pod-pilled you yet? If you read this article and thought “yes, we need pods in our DAO”, you’re in luck! We’re slowly opening our private beta and are onboarding DAOs that we think are a good fit for pods.

For context, we define a “good fit” as:

1. An organization that knows what it wants from an organizational design perspective

2. Can benefit from flexibility and permissions offered by pods

3. Driven stakeholders that understand their organization deeply

If this sounds like you, flag your interest here and we’ll be in touch.

• When government officials lied about invading Iraq, we lost trust in our representatives.

• When banks lied about the creditworthiness of mortgage backed securities, we lost trust in our financial institutions.

• When news outlets began to report false information, we lost our ability to trust credible news media.

Trust is the cornerstone of any organized society, from student clubs to governments. If we cannot be assured that our peers will follow the same rules we operate from, we hamper our ability to cooperate with one another.

And so we attempt to codify trust. We create charters and constitutions to set fundamental rules for the game. Laws help further elucidate the nuances of these rules and we employ physical and financial force to create a cost to not playing fair. In doing so, we create a strong system of assurances that you and I will respect the rules of the game through codification, cultural norms, and consequences.

For most of human history, these structural guidelines existed at the social layer. They required humans to create, disseminate, and enact these rules, which ended up being fraught with operational error, human biases, or limitations on available resources. As an example - we say the law is blind and applies indiscriminately, but because we rely on humans to enact laws, we run into biases around race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other demographics.

However, we live in the 21st century, surrounded by rapid innovations in technology with deep implications for how we organize and trust one another. We are able to encode rules into our technologies and minimize reliance on humans as intermediaries, though even encoded rules have biases.

In doing so, we begin to shift organizations from purely socialware to those aided by trustware.

Trustware vs. Socialware

Contracts, laws, charters, constitutions, and other such agreements are mechanisms that organizations use to set rules between agents in a system in order to assure certain behaviors. This assurance can come from two places:

• Socialware - Mechanisms that create assurances through human relationships, incuring a high social coordination cost

• Trustware - Mechanisms that create assurances through technology, incurring a low social coordination cost

Take, for example, a simple lemonade stand. You could set up your stand and sit there for a few hours, waiting for people to come by and purchase your delicious drink. But the assurance that people will pay is enforced at the social layer - no one will steal or underpay for a drink if you are standing there, monitoring each transaction. Though this method produces high assurance, it comes at the cost of your time. This is socialware.

A form of trustware would be a vending machine. It serves the same purpose as a lemonade stand, but the machine itself produces the assurances through technology. It’s much harder to steal or underpay when the rules are codified into a physical machine that dispenses lemony goodness.

Take another example: Protecting your valuables. You could lock your belongings away  (trustware) or rely on the legal system to protect them (socialware).

In theory, both assure that your property will be protected. The lock provides assurance through its physical presence while the law provides assurance through consequences with decades of precedent. However, in actuality, socialware is only respected when the outcome is enforced through coordination between lawyers, judges, and law enforcement whereas the lock’s enforcement is embedded into its function.

Furthermore, the social cost of the law is high. Setting up contracts involves lawyers, money, time, and knowledge of the legal system. The social cost of a lock is low - it’s easy to install a lock and distribute keys to trusted key holders, all of whom understand how keys and locks work.

Socialware and Trustware in DAOs

Blockchain and smart contracts are a massive technological level-up for trustware. Through code, we are able to create strong assurances that members of a given system will behave as the system permits them. They cannot lie, cheat, steal, or manipulate by breaking or bending the rules.

By using blockchains as our underlying assurance mechanism, we can codify organizational governance through code and not purely documented principles that rely on humans to coordinate around. In doing so, we foster greater trust between parties by minimizing trust in people and maximizing trust in technology.

This is the great “promise” of DAOs - code at the center, humans at the periphery. This is the idealistic model that allows us to maintain flat organizations that rely on consensus because we can outsource the execution of decisions to code. DAOs were envisioned as mostly trustware.

However, anyone that has worked within a DAO in the past year knows this is rarely the case. In reality, many DAOs operate using socialware, relying on documented practices and hoping there is sufficient human attention and coordination to follow these written rules.

Socialware in DAOs

Much of the organizational structure and governance in most DAOs exist at the social layer. Through codified documentation and processes that live on Notion and Discourse, we set rules about quorum, term limits, voting thresholds, etc then proceed to vote on Snapshot, and rely on a multisig to execute the terms of the snapshot vote as per the rules we set.

I’ve had a lot of these experiences at BanklessDAO. We spent dozens of hours working to set proper rules, such as the Project Proposal Framework, Governance Rules, Seasonal Specification, and Writers Guild Governance document.

Although we had systemized our rules, we still relied heavily on human coordination. These rules only mattered if we had the awareness to follow them. And because humans are prone to error and forgetfulness, there were many times we did not abide by our own standards.

The high social coordination cost of socialware often results in a gap between how a system is supposed to operate vs how it actually operates.

Trustware in DAOs

Trustware in DAOs means bringing rules on-chain. Using blockchain and smart contracts, rules defined at the social layer can be brought on-chain and enforced without reliance on human coordination.

There are a number of examples of trustware in DAOs - Juicebox, Moloch, Governor, and Pods to name a few. These tools allow humans to make decisions at the periphery and rely on code to execute the consequences of their decisions, as defined by the rules of the governing smart contracts.

This type of technology is different from simply digitization. Digitization takes something analog and makes it digital, including all sorts of redundant human tasks. Trustware is a subset of digitization that focuses specifically on trust agreements that incur a social cost through coordination. Digitization often reduces social coordination costs, but it doesn’t focus specifically on trust. We cannot digitize trust until we have sybil and censorship resistance - both qualities of blockchains.

Take, for example, the Governor contract. As mentioned above, many DAOs use a combination of Snapshot and multisig, including BanklessDAO and Yearn. In these cases, token holders vote on Snapshot, but rely on coordination between multisig signers to execute their decision - a form of socialware. The governor contract automates this step, automatically executing a transaction as soon as a vote reaches certain governance parameters, like quorum or submission thresholds. The governor contract provides equal assurances as the Snapshot + multisig combination with less social coordination. In other words, trustware.

The trust-minimized environment that trustware creates is what allows strangers to raise $40 million to buy a copy of the Constitution. Such outcomes would likely not be feasible if relying on legal assurances and not smart contract assurances.

Trustware as a Spectrum

One important caveat to note is that trustware and socialware exist on a spectrum. The definitions above are relative to one another, they are not absolute.

Multisigs are a great example. At Orca, we had a weeks-long debate on whether multisigs are trustware or socialware. After all, having a treasury managed by multiple signatories reduces the harm of any one bad actor relative to a single address controlling all funds. But at the same time… have you tried wrangling multi-sig signers? It still requires quite a bit of social coordination.

We settled on the fact that multisigs are closer to trustware than a single EOA account, but closer to socialware than something like the Governor contract or even pods.

Balancing Trustware & Socialware

Trustware is not the end-all-be-all for DAOs. DAOs are inherently human organizations that will require systems that adapt to how humans relate and behave, not robots. But successful DAOs will have a combination of socialware and trustware, each with its own healthy balance depending on the needs of the DAOs.

As of now, most DAOs orient heavily towards socialware, for apparent reasons:

• Socialware is flexible and can adapt to changing circumstances much faster than trustware

• Socialware is easier to implement, requiring less technical knowledge and execution

• Trustware can leave a DAO susceptible to governance attack vectors

• Trustware is still underdeveloped and cannot adapt to the granular needs of human governance

At Orca, our view is that the assurances provided by blockchain unlocks a new paradigm of trustware technology that is relatively underexplored. One that could potentially reduce the friction and operational overhead that slows down companies and creates unfavorable working environments. Traditional organizations over index on socialware precisely because they have only a smattering of trustware at their disposal whereas in the web3 world, we’re still only scratching the surface of what organizations operating on trustware look like.

Over time, we expect DAOs to transition elements of socialware into trustware and expand the code-at-the-center of their organization, but this will take time, technological advancements, trial and error, and continued mistakes and iterations.

We’re grateful to be a part of that process.

Metagovernance has become an increasingly popular topic within the DAO ecosystem over the last several months. It is commonly defined as holding one DAO’s token in order to influence decisions in another DAO(s). The benefits of metagovernance are clear - DAO2DAO relationships are positive-sum incentive-alignment mechanisms that amplify the voices of individuals.

Some recent proof points of the swift maturation of metagovernance knowledge and practices include:

• DAO2DAO product announcements: PrimeDAO’s soon-to-be-launched Prime Deals product

• Detailed metagovernance analysis and research: Kydo’s breakdown of the Fei-Index-Aave metagovernance play from last fall

• Formation of metagovernance committees within DAOs: Rabbithole’s announcement of the Rabbithole Metagovernance group

• Formation of whole DAOs solely focused on metagovernance participation: FireEye’s Wildfire DAO introduction

But why now?

Over the past year or two, the evolution of governance participation within DAOs has looked something like:

1. Token holders believing they can participate in all governance decisions

2. Token holders realizing they can’t participate in all governance decisions

3. Token holders delegating to individuals with perceived specialized expertise and bandwidth

4. Token holders and individual delegates realizing delegate models have been constructed ineffectively

Looking back, it’s easy to see why individual delegate participation has not yielded the results token holders have been looking for; individual delegates have misaligned incentives, unclear delineation of responsibilities, and an inherent inability to scale their impact. However, not all hope is lost. Metagovernance committee delegate models can improve governance effectiveness and participation that result from individual delegate models.

The remainder of this article will cover:

• Why individual delegate governance models lead to ineffective governance participation

• How metagovernance committee delegate models can lead to improved governance 

• Pain points with the metagovernance committee participant and stakeholder experience

• Orca Protocol as a solution for metagovernance committees

Individual delegate model shortcomings

Token holders lack context and have issues accessing relevant information required to vote on most governance decisions within DAOs. The result? Low voter turnout and little forward progress in DAO growth and maturity.

Governance architects and token holders historically believed that the solution to this apathy was delegation of voting power to individuals with competence, discipline and bandwidth to effectively participate in DAOs. However, we have seen ineffective and poor delegate participation run rampant in some of the largest protocols. For example, nearly three quarters of all $COMP delegates have never voted on-chain (Governance Participation: Perils and Promise).

Some of the shortcomings of most individual delegate models include:

Unclear responsibilities

MakerDAO outlines clear requirements and expectations for Recognized Delegates. There are strict application requirements and code of conduct, performance-based compensation plans tied to governance participation, and explicit expectations on the role played in balancing the power that other governance actors within MakerDAO hold. Most DAOs have not been as diligent.

With a number of delegation problems surfacing recently, it’s evident that governance frameworks must more clearly outline who the governance participants are and the areas of governance they must participate in.

Misaligned incentives

​​Misaligned incentives between token holders and delegates are another reason why expectations are not met, leading to ineffective governance participation. The two primary reasons for this misalignment are:

• Individual delegate reputation is often built on a different set of capabilities: As of today, the reputational capital of delegates today is rarely built through actual governance participation. Instead, they rely on their reputation as builders, investors or thought leaders. The delegate’s credibility with their primary base will continue to depend on their success in these channels. The result of this is that delegates have even fewer reasons to decline requests to speak on podcasts or chat with builders.

  This may change as the space matures, but given the nascency of the ecosystem, reputational misalignment threatens to continue.

• Lack of meaningful financial incentives: Whether we like to admit it or not, financial incentives help motivate humans to work on complex tasks and projects.

  If individual delegates 1) hold a small portion of their net worth in the protocol that they have been granted governance power in or 2) the protocol is not their primary employer, they simply will not be financially incentivized to meaningfully participate.

  In addition, there has been little to no experimentation with introducing formal compensation models to incentivize governance participation of individual delegates. For example, in ENS’ call for delegates in the fall of 2021 there was an explicit call out that there will be no additional tokens awarded to delegates, nor any mention that there will be room for experimentation in the future with the compensation model of delegates.

  MakerDAO, which is one of the oldest (formed in April of 2020) and most mature DAOs from a governance perspective, only introduced their Recognized Delegate compensation framework in October of 2021. In the future, DAOs cannot wait two years after inception to introduce financial incentive mechanisms for delegate roles.

Ultimately, individual delegates have little to lose, because their incentives aren’t aligned with the actions DAOs require of them.

Inability to scale

There are a few reasons why individual delegate models can lead to insufficient governance impact for DAOs:

• Single point of failure: Potential single points of failure are created when you rely on individual delegates to participate in governance. For example, if a specific individual delegate is best equipped to weigh in on topics related to core working group performance assessment, they potentially become the bottleneck that the DAO may depend on for this activity, which leads to inefficiency in the governance process.

  Linda Xie describes the pressure that comes with being an individual delegate best in a recent tweet:

https://twitter.com/ljxie/status/1501277544045293577?s=20&t=nRXukBBQ3kNDMDCOAQ70Kw

Unfortunately, it is not possible for delegates to temporarily assign their voting power to another delegate. This means that if a delegate becomes inactive–either temporarily or permanently–it is the delegator’s responsibility to redelegate their voting power. Most token holders, however, come into delegation with a set-and-forget approach. The forgetting part is made especially easy by the lack of visibility around voting behavior. The combination of delegation limitations and poor visibility around voting behavior creates inflexible and fragile structures and processes and degrade governance system impact and efficiency over time.

• Less effective at analyzing complex decisions: Much academic research has been published related to the advantages that diverse groups provide over individuals when participating in complex decision-making. Even with the potential downside of groupthink and conflict surfacing throughout group decision-making, in general, the knowledge, perspectives and options that groups provide lead to better solutions.

  DAOs are constantly faced with complex governance decisions, which an individual is not always equipped to handle. One example where we can see some of the difficulty associated with an individual coming up with a perspective on a complex decision is when MonetSupply, a highly competent Recognized Delegate for MakerDAO, changed his vote from ‘Abstain’ to ‘No’ for the recent offboarding of the Content Production Core Unit of MakerDAO. The decision-making associated with offboarding individuals/core working groups based on performance is complex, likely driven by objective and subjective factors.

Murky legal liability

Given the general lack of legal clarity in this space, required resources it takes to determine appropriate legal structures, and billions of dollars on DAO balance sheets today waiting to be effectively allocated, governance participation introduces a level of risk that deters individual delegates from proactively and confidently participating in DAO governance.

We’ve seen examples of this governance participation aversion due to legal risk–the MakerDAO Governance Core Unit provided anecdotes of delegate candidates objecting to take delegate positions because their proposed ‘Recognized Delegate’ compensation wasn’t enough to overcome potential legal and regulatory uncertainty.

Metagovernance committee delegate models

Given the shortcomings with individual delegate models, we are starting to see an evolution from individual “protocol politicians” to dedicated voting coalitions that represent a set of values and principles. One example of this is she256–an organization that aims to increase diversity & break down barriers to entry in the blockchain space. In November of 2021, they announced their governance initiative, which was bootstrapped by being delegated voting power to Compound, Uniswap and ENS:

https://twitter.com/she_256/status/1464381039753588738?s=20&t=nRXukBBQ3kNDMDCOAQ70Kw

There are many reasons why dedicated and structured metagovernance committees are better suited to participate as delegates within DAOs: 

Aligned incentives

In contrast to individual delegates (whose reputational capital can be built and maintained in many ways outside of their governance participation within DAOs), metagovernance committees serving as delegates have the sole purpose of effectively stewarding governance towards achieving the mission of the DAO, while representing the needs and values of their constituency. The brands, identities and value creation and capture models of these metagovernance committees are intimately tied with their ability to effectively participate in governance. Because of this, metagovernance committees have more skin in the game and much greater downside risk when ineffectively participating in governance, especially relative to individual delegates. 

Combining extrinsic reputational incentives with extrinsic financial or social incentives unlocks powerful self-fulfilling flywheels that drive greater levels of accountability and performance.

Scalability

As mentioned earlier, there are several traits of individual delegate models that lead to an inability to scale effective governance participation within DAOs. Individual delegates tend to be over-committed to various projects, introduce single points of failure, and are less effective at complex decision-making relative to groups.

With structured metagovernance pods, a flexible container is created that supports the cycles of onboarding and offboarding individuals dedicated to metagovernance participation. These governance participant entities are highly aligned and responsible stewards of delegated governance rights - which should address the low on-chain delegate governance participation that we have historically seen.

In addition, dedicated metagovernance committees are better equipped to support the complex and nuanced decision-making that DAOs require of delegates. Delegators and stakeholders should have confidence that the decisions being made by this delegate group are informed–the multiple values, perspectives, and knowledge bases of committee participants ensures there is a level of depth and breadth in the decision-making process.

Gaps and Po(d)ssibilities

Even with its advantages, several operational and experiential pain points stand in the way of metagovernance committee delegate models providing an outstanding stakeholder experience.

Improving this stakeholder experience is the primary way in which metagovernance committees will build positive brand reputations, instill confidence from the broader market, and position themselves as long-term leaders in the space. 

Orca Protocol is positioned to help metagovernance committees support their stakeholder’s experience in a few ways:

Improved visibility

Today, there are several areas in the web3 ecosystem where metagovernance committee identities present themselves (e.g., governance forums, governance platforms, etc), but no easy-to-use methods for creating and maintaining a web3 ecosystem compatible visual representation of said identity.

Orca Protocol pod membership is represented as an NFT with a custom image (of your choice). As metagovernance committees continue to perform the hard work of governance participation with DAOs, this visual brand identity is essential to building constituent loyalty, credibility, and trust. Orca Protocol is working closely with the web3 ecosystem to ensure this NFT image metadata is presented accordingly within various applications and UIs.

Increased transparency

Providing transparency into the members of a specific metagovernance committee is one way of providing confidence to vested stakeholders. Today, when a delegated wallet address votes on a proposal within a governance platform (e.g., Boardroom, Tally) it is unclear who the individual decision-makers were that were responsible for the vote. The lack of transparency leads to an inability to drive accountability and ultimately opens up room for misaligned incentives.

Orca Protocol pods address this issue in lack of transparency. We are working with each of the governance platforms to build a standard for what these composable governance units and members look like–from both a data structure and UI presentation perspective.

Fluid and intuitive membership management

Pod membership management provides scalable and modular ways to manage memberships of metagovernance committees. The durability of pods combined with accessibility of pod membership management functionality ensures the most qualified and motivated individuals always have their stakeholders’ best interests in mind. When the right pod members are making decisions the stakeholder experience (and ultimately the metagovernance committee brand) improves. 

Metagovernance composability

Pods enable metagovernance committees to click together and recompose into completely new networks, forming an evolving connective web of multi-DAO governance activity. This type of modularity, nesting and network formation is not currently possible with existing standards today. 

For example, a metagovernance committee pod could sit on a larger “metagovernance council” – amplifying the voices of their collective stakeholder bases even more in the process.

These metagovernance networks may begin to look like the “multi-hub” network described by David Ehrlichman in his book Impact Networks. In his book, David describes the importance of networks that have distributed hubs in which information flows through and decisions are made, “Reaching the multi-hub stage is a necessary step toward unlocking the special qualities that make networks a powerful force for change.”  

Orca Protocol’s pods support the evolution of these metagovernance networks. And as these metagovernance networks evolve, their stakeholders will become less reliant on central figureheads and groups–ensuring that their voices, wants and needs are represented broadly in governance activity. 

Closing Thoughts

While the trend of governance delegation to individuals had all the best of intentions, it is clear that it has fallen short of expectations. The combination of the time-commitment and depth required for participation, misaligned incentives and accountability mechanisms, and legal complexity has made it impossible for governance delegation to fulfill its promise. 

Because of this underperformance, it is clear that the rising prevalence of metagovernance committees is the next logical experiment to drive meaningful progress within DAOs. Metagovernance committees are better positioned to create aligned incentives with stakeholders  and have structures suited to provide scaled governance impact. 

With that said, Orca Protocol is proud to partner with some of the leading organizations driving the future of metagovernance, including Wildfire DAO. 

https://twitter.com/blockchainjames/status/1493658329192804355

Wildfire DAO is a governance focused community pushing forward partner DAO objectives through deep engagement with proposals, community calls and project updates. Orca Protocol will support Wildfire DAO by promoting transparency to their committees, proliferating their brand and identity throughout the web3 ecosystem, and driving decentralization goals with flexible and fluid membership management.

About Orca Protocol

Orca Protocol builds tools that enable DAOs to reach their full potential by uncomplicating collaboration. The pod primitive is a critical piece of DAO infrastructure that is designed to put people first. This flexibility allows for dynamic and composable structures to be created around any party of actors, while introducing mechanisms for accountability, incentive alignment, and checks and balances.

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Orca Protocol is now Metropolis. You read Governance Participation: Perils and Promise on the Metropolis Mirror.

We may have changed our name, but our mission remains the same. To learn more, check out our rebrand announcement.

Orca Protocol is now Metropolis. You read DAOs Wrapped 2021 on the Metropolis Mirror.

We may have changed our name, but our mission remains the same. To learn more, check out our rebrand announcement.

Orca Protocol is now Metropolis. You read Pods: The DAOnfall of Token Voting on the Metropolis Mirror.

We may have changed our name, but our mission remains the same. To learn more, check out our rebrand announcement.

Orca Protocol is now Metropolis. You read The Eightfold Path to DAOism on the Metropolis Mirror.

We may have changed our name, but our mission remains the same. To learn more, check out our rebrand announcement.