DAOfest Shanghai — That’s how you DAO it!
As a part of guerrilla mission to bring DAOstack ventures ecosystem to China, Daniel Bar, founder of bitfwd, coordinated together with awesome DAO enthusiast from China (Ruby Wu and Jessie Li,) to run a DAOfest in Shanghai.
The original idea was to run it off the back of a high profile crypto conference called PoV (PoVconf.com the website went offline), but, China being China is never boring and so as a part of the recently increased policy activities related to Blockchain the event organizers were told by the authorities that the event isn’t approved. That also had implications directly and indirectly on efforts as the original venue host the DAOfest Shanghai team engaged with as they were also told they cannot host Blockchain-related events.
The lead organizers — Jessie Li (Fat-Garage.com), Ruby Wu (DAOstep.io), Duncan Wang (HiBlock.net) and Daniel Bar (bitfwd.com) convened and decided to change the theme a bit and made it into an exclusive summit like event with capped participant count, thus reducing risk of getting the event shut down. They invited top DAO pioneers to share their experiences and knowledge.
The event attracted entrepreneurs, academics, investors, developers and university students from leading universities (Shaghai Jiaotong, NYU Shanghai campus, Shenzhen University and Tsinghua (dubbed as China’s MIT).
Ruby Wu, DAOStep:
DAOfest Shanghai is the Shanghai station of the DAOfest global event series and the first station in China. This event is co-hosted by Bitfwd, ChainNews, DAOStep, Fat Garage and sponsored by DAOStack, DAOFest. It is supported by several community partners including MarketingDAO , Socialwiki, 706 Youth Space, HiBlock, ASResearch, Winkcrypto, BTCU, CypherJump, DoraHacks, DefiLabs and Shanghai Blockchain Centre.
At first, just after DAOStep finished DAOStep One, Daniel talked to me and Jessie that we should host a DAO themed activity in China. Actually, I resist large-scale pitching activities, because based on previous experience, it is very tiring, with limited gains for the audience and limited conversion for the organizers.
Later, Daniel enticed me by suggesting we make DAOFest itself a collaborative experiment, so we had DAOFest Shanghai. We were very fortunate to have the support of DAOstack and ChainNews at the beginning.
Collaborative experiments — An organization without a “person in charge”
Based on previous experience, each activity requires a strong “engine” to organize and coordinate the preparation of the entire event. Coincidentally, at that time none of us could assume the role of an ”engine”.
So we need an “engine”. At first, we considered designing a token as a tool for incentives and collaborative management. But, we took a rain check on the token experiment in the end due to lack of time.
Fortunately, on the first day, we identified a clear division of labor and a corresponding person in charge. According to the division of labor, everyone had done their job well, while maintaining sufficient trust and respect for other people’s decisions. During the process of theme design, Daniel and Jessie both put forward a lot of ideas. Every time Daniel says “I trust your deicison as the content curator”, which not only reduces possible disputes and losses between us, but also gives us a strong peer pressure and forcing each owner to be better complete their respective tasks.
Daniel Bar, founder of bitfwd:
Its funny looking back at how we joined forces to make the DAOfest magic happen in Shanghai. I knew Ruby and Jessie and both were DAO enthusiast friends from Beijing. They both have a spark in their eyes when talking about DAOs :)
After we opened a WeChat group for the 3 of us, things started to move really fast and each of us had crazy ideas and visions for the DAO ecosystem in China. Including my prediction for how big the hype can blow out of proportion.
Soon after started our working group, we submitted a proposal to gain funding support from GenDAO and worked with Felipe and Luuk from DAOfest.io, we switched gears and started working on the event, it was all driven by strong enthusiasm and we worked really hard, it was actually quite tiring at times, but, we felt like we’re on a mission and we’re doing something really important.
And it proved to really be the true:
People were so excited and attentive they were standing at the corridor eagerly learning because there was no room!
The special thing about hosting DAOfest Shanghai is in the fact it’s the first time the leading DAO practitioners from China’s major tech hubs got together in a DAO themed summit. The participant as well as all the contributors were grassroots passionate DAO entrepreneurs, researchers and investors.
This event effectively marks the beignning of the formation of a real DAO community in China, getting people together to meet in person is what allows us to weave the relationship and form trust so that we can collaboratively contribute to building a thriving DAO ecosystem in China.
I’m really curios to see future collaborations between the participants in DAOfest Shanghai, some of these collaborations will result in globally leading innovations in the DAO space as DAOs are becoming a very important for the development of the Blockchain industry and the Chinese entrepreneurs are extremely creative and hardworking.
Duncan Wang, HiBlock:
DAOfest Shanghai meeting was a great collaboration practice for decentralized autonomous organizations. As a lead originator of HiBlock community in Shanghai, I was contributing as the loval host with onsite preparation.
All operational logistics on the day of the event and prior such as:
These were the spec we worked with
- Audio visual equipment
- Food and beverages
- Banners printing and setup
- Venue logistics (furniture, reception etc)
- Photographer (one person should be enough for stills + video)With a bit of hard work since the Hiblock crew a family, I could get help from them. I’m sure now, the more value you add to people, the more they will reciprocate when you need.
On 8th December everything was prepared amazingly well. I appreciate Daniel, who catalysed of DAOfest Shanghai, for his enthusiasm to organize the right persons to do the right things with DAO manner.
Jessie Li, Orange Paper:
I always feel like a fake DAO guy，because I have never used any DAO platform in the real world before (Aragon/Daostack/Moloch). Until this time, we co-sponsored Shanghai DAOfest. Ruby and Daniel submitted a proposal on DAOstack and succeeded. I felt practical and useful when we got the funding for the event.
DAO is more like a concept to me, a place to better organize people and let people have more possibilities. It may be the place to relieve work stress of “996”, and it is also your laboratory for trying new things …
I have done a lot of activities before this event, including contests, hackathons, workshops … The process of designing, organizing and executing each event made me feel honestly tired. Usually, the event launcher needs to schedule almost everything, and 90% of your energy consumption is used to allocate tasks and urge execution. Oh, of course, you have to endure all the strange requirements of Party A. Finally, you will have to complete the task in order to complete it.
This collaboration experience with Ruby and Daniel made me feel the charm of “15-days company” again. If using three sentences to describe, that is:
completely decentralized collaboration;
everyone has consistent goals and is very efficient;
instant feedback.
The beauty of this collaborative experience is that you don’t need to deliberately push a lot of things, because everyone is trying to promote it. When an idea comes out, we quickly evaluate its feasibility and try it immediately. If feasible, we would immediately find a way to implement it. Too many idea debts are not allowed in high efficient collaboration.
DAOfest is an event series focused on advancing the technology and adoption of decentralized governance globally.
Bitfwd is a grassroots community of cypherpunks, Blockchain developers, entrepreneurs, and crypto enthusiasts, who bring together resources, content and educational activities. Bitfwd makes Blockchain accessible to everyone!
DAOstack is designed to catalyze the future of collaboration. It’s a platform for decentralized governance that enables collectives to self-organize around shared goals or values, easily and efficiently.
HiBlock which fosters a culture of openness, collaboration, transparency, enabling connections and sharing, is committed to building a developer community focused on blockchain technology.
Learn More about DAOfest
- DAOfest.io
- daofest.bitfwd.com
- Twitter: DAOfest
Learn More about bitfwd
- Website: bitfwd.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bitfwd/
- Twitter: bitfwdxyz
- Telegram: t.me/bitfwd
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitfwd/
Learn More about DAOstack
- Website: daostack.io
- Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/daostack/
- Twitter: daostack
Learn More about HiBlock
- Website: hiblock.one
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jiangxb
- Twitter: HiBlock_Net
Learn More about DAOstep
- Website: daostep.io
- Twitter: rubyoneinch
