DAOs 101: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

What I worked on for my final project in the All Women Data Science bootcamp, wanna jump in? 😏

For all my noobs out there, we’re going to make use of the machines (mainly NLTK with python) to distill the DAO concept and take a few scrolls through the newly paved tracks that’ll teleport us to the realms of web threeeeeeee.

But, what are those?

So… Let’s start from the ‘O’ to define DAOs properly:

They’re organizations that “live” on the blockchain, where coordination and collaboration between humans take place in order to fulfill common goals.

They’re autonomous because they are self governing and this is what makes them so special, the organizations are built on top of a software (smart contract) that can be run in any computer without the presence of any government or controlling institution.

And they are decentralized because they are global and uncensorable. To explain this decentralization, it’s important to understand 3 key points:

1. One is payments because DAOs are free to trade permissionlessly without any person or organization in the network
2. Another one would be workforce in which most daos are open to contributions from anyone willing to give their work in exchange for cryptocurrency
3. How are decisions made in these organizations? With open governance: any member can propose an idea and all members can vote ‘democratically’ on every decision (will extend on why ‘democratically’ is on quotes in a future post)

Proposals?

‘A plan or suggestion, a formal or written one, put forward for consideration by others’, that’s how the dictionary defines it and these ones happen in places like snapshot, forum, discourse…

DAOs that create positive externalities

You might also be wondering what kind of proposals are risen and this is what defines the types of DAOs as well. There are many types: social, grants, information, protocol, social, philanthropy, collector, investment, media, entertainment, impact daos… And many more that are yet to be discovered.

This last category is the one that I’ve been looking at the most lately and I was very curious about what they actually meant with positive externalities.

So I grabbed the body text of 6465 proposals of 11 different DAOs and performed a topic modeling: a method for unsupervised collection of documents to find a group of words within them that best represents the information in that collection — we can see there are 5 different topics.

The two biggest topics that they care the most for are words related with coordination and daos that work towards experience related goals. The word community is very common and it makes a lot of sense because impact DAOs in general are focused on a better future for not only their communities but everyone, so I decided to keep the word in the model.

The health cluster shows words like funding or “autophagy”, because these are organizations formed by biologists, doctors and professionals from the health industry that are working on different projects.

And then we have social and communication as smaller topics. in the social one we can see ‘ubi’ as the most common word because many social daos are now discussing the concept of universal basic income and it is also the native token of one of the pioneering social daos.

Why should we pay attention to DAOs?

DAOs are new structures that are making human organization possible like never before and in order for them to thrive, I truly believe we need to lessen the learning curve and ease the onboarding process to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

Would it be of value to be able to find all DAOs that are working to regenerate our Earth, the projects that are working on solutions for a better future? In this case, this repo aims to take a closer look on the progress that each organization is making in their path. Aggregate information and make a place where the insights that people care about come together. The ultimate regen DAO mind map to understand this new paradigm of human organization.

Along with the use of machine learning algorithms, machines and humans will make our best attempt to (among other stuff) cluster the typology of DAOs into categories that represent the reality of DAOs in the web3 space. The emerging working tribes that are gathering in the ethereal, non-spatial spaces of the blockchain powered internet.

So what is the criteria that we shall apply to dare to separate this reality and make sense of it?

Watch me ranting about the project here.