Idle DAO Playbook #1
This is the first article in the Idle DAO Playbook series curated by Idle Leagues. We will talk about insights learned through the lens of DAO contributors, which can be useful to anyone working in this space.
DAOs contributors and members who participate in governance have dealt at least once with DAO tools. Currently, not all DAOs use the same tools for all the governance activities. There is no real standard yet.
What is a DAO stack?
A DAO stack is a set of tools or platforms aggregated together to handle specific activities of a DAO. We can see this stack as a flexible structure, whereby each time a new tool or platform is adopted, we add a block to this stack.
The DAOs Landscape
In 2021 we saw exponential growth in the Web 3.0 industry, with people questioning what a DAO is, how to start it, and how to join it.
Seeing new opportunities, people began to contribute actively or create DAOs. Furthermore, many professionals from big Web 2.0 moved to work in DAOs. Currently, there are almost 5k organizations listed on Snapshot, another signal of this rapid growth.
All these decentralized organizations have:
- Their way of proposals management;
- Their onboarding systems;
- Similar approaches to community management.
However, these DAOs differ from each other on clarity in explaining:
- Their governance processes;
- The tools needed to take part in the governance activities.
Keeping up the DAOs' life cycle
Thinking about the long-term growth of a decentralized organization is not easy. Yet, any DAO can realize the challenges it experiences daily.
Contributors should work on some retrospectives. They should analyze and see, from a governance side, what activities to improve and how to scale the DAO for the long term.
Simplify and improve activities. DAOs can do that through governance platforms and tools, facilitating member access and management.
Furthermore, DAOs can adopt different tools and platforms to handle problems such as:
- Voting apathy;
- Lack of community participation in discussions;
- Reputation growth;
- Reduction in the number of contributors.
DAO Stack Modularity
A stack of tools and platforms should be composable modular.
Modularity can help to either bring a tool into the set or take it out, ceasing to use it for a specific activity.
Such structure can help map all the needs that need to be managed for governance activities. With a top-down overview, this structure can help with changes or removals of specific tools that currently have a low ratio of usage to need.
Organizing vs. taking too much control
Recently, one of the most discussed topics about DAOs is how these are managed.
The industry is questioning several times if DAOs are going towards management habits and policies strictly coming from Web 2.0. Sometimes, people mention a sense of centralization in their DAOs' experiences.
A sense of centralization could be avoided by adopting a clear modular stack for managing the tools for DAO's activities.
Research published by Tally ("DAO Contributor Challenges") analyzes the current challenges that DAOs contributors face. Among these mentioned, we can find:
- DAOs don’t have a uniform stack of tools, which leads to cross-DAO confusion for members who may be accustomed to working with a certain tool stack.
- Governance voting proposals aren’t clear for users, such as the difference between Tally (on-chain) and Snapshot (off-chain).
DAOs users can choose and understand through which tool or platform they can perform specific actions using a modular stack. When one of these tools goes offline, there is no problem of single-point failure: users will do their activities on another block of the stack.
Modulating the stack of tools can make the experience easier for current and new members, bringing benefits in the long term.
The Idle DAO experience
Following the idea of adopting many DAO tools, we, too, at Idle DAO, have created a set of these for managing and optimizing some specific activities.
- Initially, we highlighted the current activities at the governance level. For each of these, we listed issues that we currently see.
- By identifying problems in governance activities (how they were managed and promoted to DAO members), we understood what to work on.
- After researching tools to use for specific governance activities, we selected those that, at the time, were valuable and useful if adopted by Idle's DAO members.
- For each tool mentioned and linked to the needed activity, we explained the rationale for future adoption of it.
- After outlining the DAO activities we identified, we drew these as stacks. Then, we added tools and related integrations of platforms already in use for these activities (e.g., Snapshot, Idle Governance platform).
Later, this work was published in the Idle Governance forum as DAO Tools Research — Idle DAO Modular Stack. These are the platforms we included in the Idle DAO Modular Stack, listed by type of activity:
Notifications (off-chain & on-chain)
Voting (off-chain & on-chain)
Snapshot & Idle Governance integration
- Commonwealth
- Boardroom
- Messari Governor
- Tally* (only on-chain)
Proposals (Discussions)
Discourse integration
- Commonwealth
- Boardroom*(read-only)
- Messari Governor* (redirects users to the forum)
Bounties (Grants & Rewards)
The aims for this research were to:
- Show to Idle DAO members limits and possible optimizations about the governance activities;
- Involve in this research the teams belonging to the platforms and tools mentioned in the post.
Our next step will be to hear more voices in the official governance post.
Then, we will move forward with full integration for the tools added to the stack. This structure will make it easier and clearer for current and new DAO members participating in governance activities.
Looking ahead
We expect to see many DAOs that already use different external tools, making their use clearer by highlighting a stack structure.
In general, active DAOs contributors work to improve:
- The organization;
- The processes;
- The architecture;
- Livability for members.
Two other things should be improved:
- Transparency showed publicly for all the activities handled;
- Clarity on the explanation of all governance processes.
Nowadays, Web 3.0 embraces many people who were just curious observers before. Now, these people want to get involved and contribute to the industry's growth or be part of a community and have a fair voice like all other members.
The industry is experiencing one of the most exciting moments seen so far.
This is an opportunity and should not be missed: improving DAOs to make access and experience in governance easy for members. Let's DAO it.
