For DAOs, with Love. Part three: Tools, methods and stories from the road.
Part 1 and part 2 of this article.
When ideas meet action and get messy, stories help make sense of things. The story of decentralised organisation building feels like it is still very much getting started. As the number of experiments grows, so does the noise. If you’re making sense and building in this space, I think these blogs, conversations and resources will add some colour and shade to the structural outlines above.
Leadership, governance and decision making.
The Enspiral Handbook is the open, public repository of working agreements, guides and processes. It is written primarily as a practical resource for Enspiral contributors to run Enspiral — but can be useful as a resource. The decision making agreement is a particularly useful cornerstone.
Alanna Irving’s Full Circle Leadership was originally shared as a blog post in 2016, and has since expanded with further articles highlighting common patterns and shadows and challenges. The model remains an extremely useful resource for recognising and celebrating different forms of leadership in non-hierarchical organizations. Alanna covers bossless leadership, decision making and working with money in depth on this podcast with Lisa Gill.
This conversation with Richard Bartlett and Enspiral’s original instigator (ex-Founder) Joshua Vial covers some of the common patterns and traps for leaders leading from source vision, to centralisation towards decentralisation.
Microsolidarity is a fantastic living, growing, open community resource instigated and developed by long time Enspiral members Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo from The Hum.
Highly recommended for understanding the social physics of belonging and creating coherence in groups at different scales. Richard also shares much of his thinking out loud on twitter and substack.
Borderless, remote organising is exciting, but effective in person gatherings remain crucial for building decentralized organizations tied together by resilient community bonds. This written reflection breaks down much of the hidden complexity into actionable ideas.
This podcast conversation with Richard and Silvia Bastos shares more context of why, and the details of how, retreats became a critical heartbeat for Enspiral.
Looking at how an organization makes decisions is an effective way to gauge how decentralized it is. Enspiral was lucky to grow up alongside the Loomio tool. Loomio is an off-chain, open source software tool designed specifically around collaborative decision making processes. Enspiral continues to use Loomio to make complex governance community agreements and day to day updates and decisions.
Optimi is a no-code/low-code agency that has been a core part of Enspiral’s operational layer. For a zoom in on the nuts and bolts of how decentralised organising systems are built, which tools are used and why, check out some of their writing. Sometimes it’s the unsexy work of wiring up the right tools in the right way that enable a new kind of workflow to emerge. For an example, check out their blueprint of how Enspiral built its self organising, multi-tier membership model.
Kate Beecroft and Lisa Gill dive deeply into where self management and DAOs meet in this podcast episode on Leadermorphosis. They cover many topics including dissensus, healthy tension beyond consensys, patterns for thinking about and understanding how self management principles map to decentralised organising.
Over the years many Enspiral teams have experimented with money, running self setting salary processes and collective consulting revenue sharing models.
Cobudget is a tool originally built by Enspiral contributors to help spend common resources in a democratic way. Over years of experimentation in collaborative budgeting and funding, several patterns and methods have evolved in different groups. Here are some examples from Enspiral. Dive further into the details of these processes in the cobudget handbook.You can also follow the work of Francesca Pick, a co-founder of Greaterthan, longtime member of Enspiral and Ouishare who is actively stewarding the cobudget project. Follow her writing on medium or via Greaterthan.
And finally, yes, here comes the book plug…
We published Better Work Together in 2019 as a co-authored guide and reflection on methods, stories, success and failure from building Enspiral. It brings together multiple perspectives on how Enspiral formed, what was most important, what worked, what didn’t and why it was worth trying. You’ll find it in paperback and e-pub here.
For more resources like this, stay tuned as we continue publishing, sharing stories and resources at blog.betterworktogether.co
Read part 1 and part 2 of this article.
