DAO Ops Update
A Signal DAO retrospective, what DAOs really need, and next steps for DAO Ops.
DAOs are not a technical problem, they are a community problem. — Peter ‘pet3rpan’
DAO Ops is a set of practices that aims to systematize the management of DAO functions and reduce human coordination costs associated with resource allocation, decision-making processes, and membership administration.
Early Insights
Traditionally we focus on onboarding via Incremental Decentralization, and in 2019 knocked in a slew of integrations for the Abridged SDK. Unfortunately, we found that bootstrapping a userbase was extremely difficult for our early customers. We learned about the false narrative of “if you build it, they will come.” DAO Ops first came in as a distribution play.
Our early iterations of chat-based DAO tooling came out in December, and by January we created the first mock interface for a DAO in Telegram. The Signal DAO was our flagship experiment supported by the MetaCartel in February.
Informed by a year of participation in the MetaCartel, our team recognized a few pain points experienced within the DAO frameworks implemented today:
- Uncertainty around when voting is happening (information asymmetry)
- Difficulty with voting access (participation)
These two points provide the basic building blocks of what it takes to make effective on-chain decisions.
The true challenges of DAOs lies in community coordination. Gathering individual sentiment, instilling a sense of trust, creating experiences both in person and virtually to build bonds with people… these are the pieces that require the heaviest lift. Voting is very important, but secondary to the social coordination challenge in DAO structures.
Birth of DAO Ops
The idea for DAO Ops came from a want to both make these systems more accessible to a wider userbase and more effective for the existing userbase. Recognizing the true challenge of social coordination, our effort built on-chain functions into interfaces where these interactions already happen.
Chat-based crypto also came from learnings we gathered from the release of our first Archanova SDK… we fell into the trap of “if you build it they will come” and the general truth is “if you build it, nobody cares”. Even if an app is using crypto with a Web2-like interface, encouraging users to migrate to a new platform continued to block adoption for applications we integrated with.
Functional chat-based interfaces solve this by bringing apps to pre-existing populations. This limits friction with behavioral change by eliminating the need for migration.
First User Feedback
Ok, we have all the pieces, now where do we go? First stop: user feedback.
Do people want this? What are the flaws? Who will use it? How do we create a test to see how people use it? Signal DAO began to answer these questions.
This experiment allowed us to rapidly deliver a no risk MVP to understand the efficacy of chat interfaces to facilitate interactions from DAO members. While the findings are not perfectly correlated, participation in Signal DAO hovered around 11% voting participation compared to the <1% participation in traditional Moloch DAO interfaces.
To understand the factors contributing to the difference in participation, we need to look at the cultures of the DAO communities as well as their voting mechanisms and parameters.
Moloch DAO:
- Community of highly committed ETH dedicated people
- Proposals used to distribute money
- Lacks controversial proposals (if nobody says “no” then consensus is assumed)
- Members do not know when voting is open
- Voting access is restricted to desktop / MetaMask
- Voting is open for a week
Signal DAO:
- Community of interested people from ETH and CT ecosystems
- Proposals used for idea validation and conversation
- Members receive notifications when voting opens
- Voting access is “as easy as liking”
- Voting is open for an hr
Signal DAO Shortcomings
Only two weeks after deployment, Signal DAO gained significant traction and showed some of the strongest membership participation with an average of 11% voting rate per proposal. This data does verify the utility for a chat based DAO system, but voting alone does not a DAO make.
The original intent of Signal DAO was to build a feeder system for Moloch and MetaCartel. Many members of the project were also members of the larger DAOs, and otherwise were knowledgable crypto folk with a good sense of what works well in the ecosystem. The issue was that the structure for getting a proposal through one of the main DAOs still requires significant effort.
Signal DAO is a first stop. To receive funding from Moloch or MetaCartel, you need a champion within those DAOs. They socialize the idea. They submit the proposal. While ideas are important, the art of receiving funds from Moloch, MetaCartel, the EF, any of these systems requires a narrative that captures the minds of the membership within each organization.
Unless a champion from these communities wants to dedicate time to push the proposals in Signal DAO to the next step of the process, as it stands today, the project will not survive.
DAOs are Nothing, Community is Everything
Since launch, the Signal DAO did bring about some great ideas. One being “Voting is the New Like!”.
Imagine a new world where social media translates to direct impact for society. This is what a future iteration of DAO Ops will provide.
Voting is the new like! — James Young or Peter ‘pet3rpan’
Still, the piece that requires a more significant lift in these organizational structures comes from coordinating people, and inspiring a certain level of commitment.
Much of this commitment is generated in the initiation into the organization. For instance, a key difference between the MetaCartel and the Signal DAO is ease of onboarding. The friction associated with the process to launch into a MetaCartel required commitment to get through. Members develop bonds with others while learning how to use this primitive technology we decided to coordinate around.
Ethereum also requires social coordination to make progress. The combination of Vitalik’s skill as a developer, philosopher, technologist led him to his greatest achievement: creating the most robust developer community in all of blockchain. This social layer on top of the underlying protocol functions as a more complex and nuanced DAO system. The initiation process requires individuals to spend hours understanding crypto cannon. Social coordination lives between github, twitter, telegram, discord, ethresear.ch, and developer conferences. Decision’s are not typically made on-chain in this open network, although the ones that are on-chain translate to the most significant impacts (see the DAO hack).
Frameworks like Moloch, Aragon, DAOstack, Colony, Commonstack all aim to make on-chain decision-making at scale more effective. DAO Ops aims to continue lowering that barrier to increase the surface area of engagement and empower communities to continually understand the health of their organization.
A Path Forward
The grant given by the MetaCartel helped support Abridged in this first step into DAO Ops. Since the Signal DAO we’ve created a number of different bots assisting communities with notifications, tracking pushups in Peer Pressure DAO, and permissioning access with the Gandolf bot.
See bot tutorial videos here.
We are excited to receive a Nest grant from Aragon to develop a Signal DAO-like system for mainnet. This week we released a first version of the product under Collab19. The goal with this initiative is to create a Schelling point for people in web3 to join forces intellectually and financially to support communities and initiatives adversely affected by this global pandemic.
The challenge now with this Collab19 is not about the tech, but about fostering the community and culture that makes the tech valuable. Read more on the site, or jump right into the bot here.
As we continue building, DAO Ops will focus on not only on-chain interactions, but providing a comprehensive platform for users to quickly interact with the communities they are involved with.
We’re excited to continue down this path, and appreciate your support as we build toward a more collaborative future.
Abridged website: https://www.abridged.io
Abridged Twitter: https://twitter.com/abridged_io
Abridged Telegram community: https://t.me/joinchat/GzdYLUQYAN5ALnGTXmqUcg
Best of Abridged Newsletter: https://abridged.substack.com
