“Humanomous” + “Autonomous”: The composability of DAO governance
The minimum viable DAO for a single goal has been validated and can be successful, such as the MolochDAO. But we know that human collaboration is often more than minimum viable units, even require large scale collaboration. DAO governance is a very important topic if we want to apply DAO to more space because poor DAO governance will push us into the “rabble” mire. Unfortunately, there isn’t yet a set of guidelines for DAO governance to help us.
In early March last year, I participated launch of a DAO (as the general coordinator) in China with over 200 participants, including Web3 developers, Web2 developers, and a large number of non-technical people (designers, product managers, executives, accountants, entrepreneurs, media workers, musicians, painters, filmmakers, students, etc.) who have never been engage in Web3. It has been running for nearly a year and gave me some DAO governance experience and lessons. I always wanted to write some articles about this, but have no time.
These days, Kames and I talked about DAO governance in the 1 million developers community, and I shared some of my points. This chat led me to complete this article about DAO governance. Thanks, Kames! I’d like to continue other articles of DAO, preferably a series. Hope to be able to provide some reference or inspiration for those who plan or already in DAO. But they’re just my opinion, not necessarily true. If the person pushed you into the mire is me, I won’t save you!
We face many questions or puzzles about DAO governance, such as:
What form of governance is “decentralized”?
How do we realize “autonomous”?
The advantage of DAO should be to reduce communication costs by automatically code, but why do we not seem to reduce communication costs, but higher?
I want to use DAO to complete product development, how do I manage the project?
I’m an entrepreneur, and I’m excited DAO, but do I really to turn my company into a DAO?
…
All of these puzzles focus on one problem: how do we do is called DAO(decentralized & autonomous). Obviously, we’re faced with the problem of basic principles of organization governance. It’s like 0 and 1 in binary code, all or nothing (dichotomous thinking). Because of the problem of dichotomous thinking, many DAOs fall into the mire, and many people who try to use DAOs are deterred.
So I think DAO governance needs to be incremental. This is the basic idea to solve these problems.
Incremental
We’re not ready for a pure DAO. Because the governance mechanisms, tools, and technologies are not yet perfect. But more important is people’s awareness and habits. We can’t guarantee that every participant is ready for DAO. Just like web3 products, we need to find a way to make it easier for web2 users to get into Web3, more users and faster. Once the scale effect of web3 is formed, the web3 ecosystem can be truly activated. Eric Chung introduces this point in his article Incremental Decentralization.
DAO governance is the same. Only by allowing DAO to form a scale effect in society can we truly activate the development of the global DAO network, including the DAO governance mechanism, tools and technology, and people’s awareness and habits.
So try not to put yourself in an “all or nothing” shackle until you’re ready. We have no direct flights to Rome. We have to “incremental”.
But the question is, how do we “incremental”? I think there’s a way:
“Humanomous” + “Autonomous”
Besides, can we really realize pure “Autonomous”? This is also a topic worth studying.
“Humanomous” + “Autonomous”
Forgive me for coining the word “Humanomous”!
Humanomous is a “hot link” , an unquantifiable, high-frequency communication, as Telegram group. Autonomous is “cold link”, a quantifiable, low-frequency communication, and one way to do this is Bounty.
Humanomous is used to solve the unquantifiable business of DAO governance. Such as DAO’s future planning, dealing with emergencies, discussing major issues, etc. These things usually can’t be designed in advance to be self-executing. It’s like we can’t design a standardized response plan for an emergency in advance, because the components of each emergency are different. Obviously, Humanomous is not a pure DAO spirit. But it can solve the toughest problems in DAO governance.
Autonomous is designed to handle quantifiable transactions in DAO governance. Such as development tasks, design work, Accounting work, etc. These transactions can usually design automatic programs in advance. A good way to do that is Bounty. The biggest advantage of Bounty is replicability. We even need to design a perfect Bounty mechanism to handle different types of work, just need to modify the option parameters. The most important part of Bounty is quantification. As long as it is quantified enough, many of the tasks and works of the DAO don’t rely on communication or don’t even have to. Generally, if your DAO is a non-minimum viable DAO, such as a product development team, or a decentralized company, Autonomous will be most of the DAO governance effort.
Bounty usually needs to include the contents of each part of the task and their indicators, such as task description, task needs list and rules, completion time, acceptance rules, reward amount, etc. Let’s take a bold example:
DAOSquare Bounty #007
Description: Develop a dapp to attack the Pentagon
Needs list:
- Mac Desktop
- Language: Swift
- Rules: Within 10 lines of code
- iPhone APP
- Language: Swift
- Rules: Within 9 lines code
Completion time: 3 hours
Acceptance rules: A real attack on the Pentagon, success = qualified
Reward amount: 10 $MAGIC
we also can use this Bounty template for other tasks, let’s take a look:
DAOSquare Bounty #008
Description: Clean the room
Needs list:
- Living room
- Tools: Mop
- Rules: Within a bucket of water
- Kitchen
- Tools: Mop
- Rules: Within half a bucket of water
Completion time: 1 hour
Acceptance rules: Pass the microscope without seeing bacteria
Reward amount: 5 $MAGIC
Hope no one posts this Bounty! But seriously, the more clear of Bounty, It’s will be smoother and the communication costs will be lower.
Of course, there’s bound to be a Bounty. Like the bounty hunter suddenly quit. At this time, we need to start the Autonomous to deal with that f**cking problem.
So, we need to flexibly mix Humanomous and Autonomous in DAO governance. My suggestion is Componentization.
Componentization
We’d better take Humanomous and Autonomous as two components, like Lego. According to our needs, flexibly mix into different governance solutions. For example, we can break a software development project into different tasks, each task like a Lego block (Humanomous block or Autonomous block). And it’s likely that a block itself is made up of several different blocks. It’s like creating a Lego city, a building as part of the city (a block), but it’s also made up of a lot of different blocks.
So, whether you can do DAO governance well depends on whether you are a good Lego player!
After discussed the componentization of DAO internal governance, let’s expand the scope to see how componentization can take advantage of a collaborative network of DAOs.
First of all, I’d like to express my opinion: Try not to launch large, complex DAO, which has a high failure rate. The DAO with the strongest vitality and the easiest to succeed should be the minimum viable DAO. Similarly, the strongest vitality and the easiest to succeed DAO collaboration network should be composed of all kinds of the minimum viable DAO. The success of Yiwu’s small commodity industry is proof enough.
Based on this pattern, each DAO in the network is a component or Lego block.
Vitalik said:
“The killerness of the ecosystem is not the nodes, it’s the links. Every single application that gets built is not just an application in its own right, it’s also a component that every future thing in the Ethereum ecosystem can benefit from.”
The same is true of the DAO collaboration network. The killerness is the link. Every DAOs should become a component of the DAO network so that other DAOs or DAO combinations in the network can benefit from it.
The question is, how to link the DAOs in the network to build a lego world? Similarly, we can make use of the governance blocks of Humanomous and Autonomous. The “Humanomous + Autonomous” model can be used not only as a tool for DAO internal governance, but also for external governance, between DAO and DAO, and even for the DAO network.
We can also use Bounty to trade between DAO and DAO, which is a bit like a contractor. If the DAO collaboration network is based on a minimum viable DAOs, then each DAO is a contractor for the other DAOs or employer. If their transactions are based on Tokens, then the common interests of each other and even the DAO network will be maximized. this is a positive-sum game. Compared with the traditional business collaboration model, it has absolute advantages and competitiveness.
Everything is moving very fast, especially DAO. So don’t read this article again in six months, it will be a joke! Maybe…now is
Some questions
My DAO is a large, complex DAO, what should I do?
This is a common problem and is also an issue for those who want to turn their company to DAO. my suggestion:
First, cut the non-core units. For example, tax work could be outsourced.
Then split your DAO into a number of minimum viable DAOs and keep them in sync through a coordination unit.
But I don’t recommend it, especially if you’re new to DAO.
How do I use Bounty? Have any tools or templates?
I used to make some Bounty templates with Google Sheet. Although it needs someone to manage the Bounty process, it’s not “autonomous”, but it works normally. If have a great tool that would be great. Is that a business opportunity?
Is there any place where I can learn this knowledge?
DAOSquare is this place! You can find us here:
Website: http://dao2.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DAOSquare
Discord: https://discord.gg/wtgQN5C
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/P3b7phcffJ-xrwN3XeA7AQ
Plus, we’re building a better place, and you’re gonna love it! Want to get a little ahead of the game? Contact us!
