The DAO Experiment.
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. Basically a group of people get together with a model to distribute decision making and the value generated through the network. No centralized authority to make final decisions and no central entity holding custodianship of the value. What this also means is an unstoppable organization, no one person has liability, no one person has the ability to exit scam, and when totally decentralized it can not easily be censored or shutdown by a state or corporate power.
I think the question on many people’s minds is could a decentralized org really work and on the topics of DAOs.
A few networks have attempted fully DAO structures or partial DAOish structures but not many have had great success. There have been a few partial successes and many partial failures and even some spectacular failures.
One thing is for sure
DAO is hard
The network should be open to anyone who wishes to participate at any level.
- Permissionless is hard
People need to be able to make decisions and work together
- Reaching a quorum is hard
People need to be able to vote democratically
- Participation in governance is hard
People should be rewarded for adding value and participating in the network
- Keeping track of reputation is hard
- Distributing value is hard
Getting hacked/gamed is easy
To make an unstoppable organization you need an unstoppable network and unstoppable code backing it. You need transparency and communication.
So DAO is hard… or is it?
Traditional organizational structures do not work well decentralized, The hierarchical and Siloed systems need someone on top and, until recently, the technology did not exist to enable many people to interact in a trustless manner.
But this new technology is being built now, by thousands of developers, from platform devs to frontend application devs, product designers and UX engineers. They are building really cool and interesting things that are changing paradigms. At the heart of this technology are smart contracts and blockchains, and probably cryptocurrencies to distribute value and resources across networks.
The idea of using blockchain tech and smart contracts to enable these types of organisations may seem far fetched or like scifi. But there is already interesting work happening in the field now. Now is the time to start experimenting, and collecting data and metrics on use and experience of members. Start experimenting, look for approaches that work and others that do not work so well.
Over the last year there has been an explosion of work going into DAOs, some groups focusing on infrastructure and others diving right in and launching and experimenting with homegrown DAOs now.
To make these experiments longer lasting and more successful we should be asking ourselves some questions.
What metrics can we track and what are the KPIs?
What is the goal and what strategies do we take?
What have we learned from traditional web/game/application development and how can we leverage it?
Who should we be talking to? We are developers and not experts on organizations — besides maybe our project scrum groups. Who can we talk to about different forward thinking org models like Holocracy, Agile, Sociocracy 3.0 or CONE?
Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
