From inspiration to learning, exploring and finally joining a DAO: how I fell in love with DAOs and found ways to contribute
“It’s actually all of us vs our own inability to coordinate. Hence the game is not how we get my team to beat your team, but how we get more teams working together. And the way we do this is — we build tools, we build protocols. The greatest thing about Ethereum is that we can build global protocols that can advance coordination faster and cheaper than ever before.”
These lines have stuck with me for a long time now. They are from an interview with Ameen Solainmani at MCON Denver ’21. Whenever someone asks me what a DAO is — I start here. It’s the future of borderless collaborative work, and is a model that can be applied to many cases from the distribution of public goods to decision making to resource allocation. Actually, as we’ll see later in this article, the DAO framework is already being applied to multiple scenarios (Hey, we almost bought an original copy of the American constitution with it!)
If I wanted to be more precise, I’d say that a DAO is a decentralized organizational structure embedded in blockchain technology, that enables permissionless collaboration, a trustless way of managing assets and ideas, and incredible transparency of the process. Let’s look at one of the examples I found particularly interesting — the DXdao.
DXdao is a DAO that builds DeFi products and governance ideas. Their current suite of projects includes Omen, a prediction market; Swapr, a governance-enabled AMM; and some more (explore it!).
DXdao is built on top of DAOstack — an open-source software that DAOs use to easily implement their voting and management. New proposals like what to do with the money in the treasury, or how much to pay contributors, can be created by anyone. To vote on these proposals you have to be a member of the DAO with REP (measured reputation, which in DXdao also represents a person’s voting power). You can gain REP by being active in the community and contributing to the DAO. It is in this manner that every single decision is taken in the DAO and how its more than $100 Million treasury is managed.
Such Decentralized Autonomous blockchain Organizations are called DAOs. The motives behind DAOs vary — some, like DXdao, make wide ranging DeFi products, some exist to control proceeds from NFT sales (see Nouns DAO), distribute grants to projects (see Gitcoin) or function as decentralized venture funds (“Venture DAOs”, such as MetaCartel Ventures). DeepDAO has listed many of these for you.
When I use the word “trustless’’ about cooperation in a DAO, there are friends who mistook it for the absence of trust. It is rather the irrelevance of trust (or of worries surrounding trust), replaced by mechanisms (like smart contracts) that keep checks on decision making so that we don’t need to trust any single or a centralized body to know what is right.
You must have realized by now how important transparency is to this whole setup. Since we all deserve a fair chance to participate in decision-making of the DAO, it is essential for everyone else to see what I am proposing: There can be no information asymmetry at all- from hiring to compensation to treasury diversification decisions, voting results and execution. Anything that’s registered on the blockchain is immutable and open for everybody. Hence, governance forums — where proposals are posted and discussed — and voting mechanisms are undoubtedly the backbone of any DAO.
But yeah- people are lazy (not me or you of course). People are also too busy working, too tired to entertain one more proposal, or too new to participate. Basically not all members of a DAO will read forums and take part in governance. Indeed, low participation is an issue that many DAOs are already tackling. As DAOs get bigger and the number of decisions per day increases- how do we ensure that we have the required attention? We’ll discuss that in another article.
Let’s get you in a few DAOs now.
So, where to start?
Have a look at the DAOs listed on DeepDAO. There are many useful metrics which you can use to study a DAO. For example, from numbers like member count and voter participation you can judge how small and active the DAO is. Its description, discussions and decisions may help you decide if they are working on something that interests you.
Community Channels
A DAO’s community channels are where members of the DAO hang out. Discord and Telegram are currently the main go-to platforms for this (see this Aragon blogpost), and many other web3 and web2 communication channels serve great importance as well. This was the first exposure I had to different working groups and to the culture in DAOs.
Getting on a DAO’s Discord server (or whatever the community channel is) and hanging around for a few days will give a good picture of what is happening. Drop a “Hi!” when you feel comfortable enough — you’ll make a lot of friends. Also these platforms are a great way to get support if you get stuck while using their products.
Join Forums, Govern the DAO!
The next step in becoming a knowledgeable DAO member is indulging in decision making: reading forum posts, thinking, deliberating and voting on them. The right to vote can be either earned by contributing to the DAO (like with DXdao), and / or granted through ownership of the DAO’s native governance token (like for example in the case of Uniswap).
After the initial break- in phase, I took shots at contributing to DAOs. Of course, you can show up on the discord and ask for opportunities on day 1 — but I feel it’s better to do it after identifying with the culture and the people already working there. It is important to get comfortable first.
The initial contribution I made was attending meetings, asking doubts and giving feedback. Then I took the responsibility of some research + writing — just for the fun of it. I wasn’t expecting any compensation initially and would be happy with some !praise (check out TEC to learn about !praise) — but as I started contributing more seriously, incentives followed.
There are tons of opportunities for people who code, meme creators, designers, community leads, scribes, managers etc. — just like any other organization, but more directly accessible. Some DAOs like DXdao recruit actively (although it might be harder to get into a position in such “big” DAOs), while in others like TEC (in the process of becoming a DAO), anyone can show up and become a contributor. The smaller and newer the DAO — the higher and more immediate their need will be for talent.
Of course, joining a DAO doesn’t mean quitting whatever you are doing and taking the dive. You can start as a small-time contributor, giving a few hours every week. Try contributing to different teams to see what you like best (or if you like anything at all). The rest — your gut will lead you.
