DAppNode DAO V2.0

Having a productive DAO is hard. Successfully coordinating people in a novel structure isn’t something that can be taken lightly. DAppNode DAO initially planned to launch in February but could not coordinate enough members across the various guilds to get them off the ground.

What went wrong? In retrospect, we think that the primary failure might have been being too ambitious and trying to do too many things simultaneously.

In this piece, we will look at lessons learned from the first attempt and how we will be applying these lessons moving forward.

“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.”

DAppNode DAO initially planned to launch in February 2022 with four separate guilds and an overseeing governance guild. The guilds that were initially planned were:

•Builders

•Communications

•Support

•Tokenomics

An additional governance guild would be formed by the guild leads of the four project guilds in combination with DAppNode core guild members. The idea was that the governance guild would be responsible for allocating the DAO treasury funds across the project guilds and settling any disagreements within the guilds.

This plan had no fundamental flaw, but the implementation didn’t go as planned. One common difficulty for DAOs is everyone assuming things will happen organically. In reality, DAOs depend on community members pushing things forward. Without a structured leadership hierarchy driving objectives down the chain of command, projects can stall. Community members stepping into leadership roles is the only way to achieve goals. In a world of cats minding their own businesses, the figure of the Cat Herder is more important than ever.

So, what went wrong? There’s probably a combination of things, but mainly, by trying to start all guilds at the same time, the Cat Herder got overwhelmed before other community figures could rise to the task in every guild.

Fall, get up and try again.

There were a lot of lessons and takeaways from the first attempt at launching the DAppNode DAO. On June 8, 2022, DAppNode hosted a community call to discuss the future direction of the DAO and to assess the issues of the first attempt. The primary takeaway was that less is more. Starting with a single guild and focusing on learning how to accomplish objectives would have a higher chance of success than multiple guilds working on separate projects.

With that in mind, the DAO has decided to launch a singular Communications Guild that would be primarily focused on creating educational content around DAppNode’s product offerings.

Community member MaxShytoshi has already made a DAppNode Dashboard that will help DAppNode users find documentation that is useful to them. The DAppNode Newsletter also has a planned revival, which will also allow users to stay up-to-date on developments in the DAppNode ecosystem. Lastly, the Ethereum merge is right around the corner. As a leader in at-home staking infrastructure, DAppNode will be releasing documentation to make sure all Ethereum stakers running on DAppNode will be fully prepared for the Merge.

Who can join this guild? Anyone with the willingness to contribute. We are learning from best practices in the ecosystem and using DAO-native tools like Coordinape and Dework to track and appraise people’s contributions. These tools help to integrate new contributors and align the work being done with the objectives of the guild.

A builder’s guild is brewing

Following the movement in the Communications guild, a few of the builders in the community are gathering around the #dao-builders-team channel in Discord to put some structure to the development needs of the DAO.

Are you a communicator? A project manager? A builder? A Devops? Someone excited about contributing to the future of distributed infrastructure? These guilds are completely open to anyone and work is appraised by the peers participating in the guild. Join us in the Discord and let’s start collaborating!

Wanna contribute to the DAppNodeDAO? Join the Discord and join the #dao-communications-guild or the #dao-builders-guild channels and introduce yourself! We can take it from there to get you onboarded!

If you want your own dappnode and become a Node Runner, visit us here to install it or buy a plug-and-play machine.