How to onboard yourself to a DAO

Daniel Bar 丹尼尔👩🏼‍🎤
Bitfwd
Published in
4 min readApr 22, 2019

Hello fellow netizens, if you’ve arrived at this corner of the internet, it means you are considering participating in a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or as the cool kids sometimes call it a DAO.

Since the famous The Dao hack in 2016, few people have remained believers of the possibility we’ll ever see a functioning DAO, but my friend Matan Field and the awesome team at DAOstack are true pioneers of this space and so they’ve been busy working on building the unimaginable!

In this post, I won’t go into the whole depth of what DAOs are and what they can enable, I trust that the team at DAOstack as well as other teams provide better content than I would. I will also not focus on security aspect of using decentralized tech, use this guide at your own risk ⚠️⚠️⚠️

What I’ll focus on is the steps required to onboard yourself to the experimental DAO that’s currently running through DAOstack’s Alchemy platform.

If you want to ask any questions about the steps and products mentioned in this tutorial feel free to jump in and ask a friendly cryptocat in the chat on bitfwd community (bitfwd.com) Telegram channel at: t.me/bitfwd

👩🏼‍🎤👨🏾‍💻👧🏻👩🏼‍🏫🧕🏻🧔🏻🐨🌈⏩

Before we start, here are the list of digital products you’re gonna need to follow this tutorial:

Ingredients

  1. Web Browser: 🔥🦊 Firefox of Mozilla is my recommendation but you can also use Brave or Chrome.
  2. Metamask: 🦊 This is a web browser plugin that makes your browser compatible with Web3 supported sites and serves as your browser wallet.
  3. ETH: ⛓💰 You’ll need a small amount of ETH to pay your gas fees as you submit your proposal to the Ethereum Blockchain.
  4. Google Docs or GitHub account: 📑 You’ll need to draft an external proposal and conveniently allow people to publicly view your proposal and be able to post suggestions.
  5. Twitter account: 🐥 This is optional though, it’s recommended as this is a way to publicly demonstrate your social proof. LinkedIn and many other networks force people to be signed in when they want to see posts published by others.
  6. Telegram or Discord: 💬 These are optional, but they will be very useful because a lot of the crypto community discussions are happening on those two platforms.

Preparing the proposal

We’ll break it into steps, if you get stuck in any of the steps, feel free to reach out on bitfwd community Telegram. If you find the order doesn’t make sense to you, feel free to carve your own way.

  1. Using Google Docs (or GitHub), write a reputation request proposal following the format of the proposal I wrote here: Daniel’s reputation request proposal. If you’re using google docs, when you’re generating the document sharing link, make sure you enable ‘suggestions’ but not ‘edit’ mode, otherwise trolls may wipe your proposal.
  2. Paste the google doc (or GitHub) link into a public tweet similar to the one I wrote: https://twitter.com/danieltbar/status/1118482875869831173

3. Paste the tweet link into the Google doc to cross reference.

4. Using your browser, head over to Genesis DAO on Alchemy (DAOstack’s DAOs portal). There are more DAOs coming, but the Genesis DAO is the experiment that is most relevant to start with at this point.

5. Assuming you’ve set up your Metamask and have some ETH loaded on your account (and if you’re struggling — bitfwd Telegram: t.me/bitfwd) you can start the proposal submission on Alchemy interface.

6. Open up a new proposal by clicking the “+ New Proposal” button at the top right of the screen.

DAOstack’s Genesis DAO Alchemy interface

7. Fill in the fields of the proposal as shown in the screen:

7.1 Reputation Request: Your Name.

7.2 Short description to your request.

7.3 Paste your google/GitHub proposal link.

7.4 Paste your dedicated Metamask ETH address.

7.5 Insert ‘100’ (that’s the current convention) at the Reputation reward field, leave all other reward fields at ‘0’.

7.6 Press submit. You’ll then be required to approve the transaction using your Metamask, to do that you’re gonna have to pay the associated gas fees.

Next, existing Genesis DAO members who have reputation can vote on your proposal and discuss it in the various channels. If you’d like to get in touch with the Genesis DAO community and the DAOstack community follow their Telegram (https://t.me/daostackcommunity) and Discord groups and feel free to ask questions.

Socials for Daniel

Learn More about bitfwd

From DAOstack:

Learn More about DAOstack

Experience Alchemy, currently live (in alpha) and in use on the Ethereum mainnet.

Follow DAOstack on Medium, Twitter, or any of the other channels you’ll find on our website.

Interested in joining the Pollinators, our official early-adopter community, and participating in the Genesis DAO? Message our Pollinators program coordinator.

Part of an organization interested in creating a pilot DAO or building on DAOstack? Connect with us here.

Developer? Check out the DAOstack Github, or jump into the stack with our friendly Hacker’s Kit.

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Daniel Bar 丹尼尔👩🏼‍🎤
Bitfwd
Editor for

Scaling freedom UX @ Blockathon DAO ☯️ SolarpunkVC @ Bitfwd.com👩🏻‍💻+🧧⏩🦄 Impact Community @ EHF.org 👩🏻‍🌾🌏