Transparency in DAOs
The long term success of a DAO needs more than just technical code. It also needs to foster trust and commitment between its members, and between the members and the DAO. To turn a DAO’s vision into reality, its participants should be genuinely committed and understand that every one of them has a relevant role in taking care of the system and ensuring its sustainability.
So, how do we build commitment and trust among people who only communicate through the Internet and have never met? How can we keep track of the actions of the working groups and invite the community to participate in mutual monitoring? That’s where transparency plays an important role. Transparency makes all actions performed visible. Through a sense of belonging, community members must help keep the DAO’s values, but transparency is the tool needed to look back and work issues out as this evolving process for the DAO pushes the community forward. It fosters accountability and involves all members in the auditing of work being done.
We encourage DAOs to provide multiple ways for its members to participate in and also monitor the activities happening. Providing equal access to information, and involving agents to care for rules that apply to all, eliminates the need for external agents and increases the commitment of participants to engage in the advice process. Trust comes when we can comprehend the behavior of other actors by using the same framework applied to one.
In this sense, we follow Nobel Prize winning political economist Elinor Ostrom’s guidance:
Without monitoring, there can be no credible commitment, without credible commitment, there is no reason to propose new rules. — E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons
Transparency Working Group
The TEC has been exploring and iterating on different methods to achieve a high level of transparency and mutual monitoring. The TEC now has a dedicated working group to proactively reinforce transparency across our DAO. The Transparency Working Group aims to:
- Facilitate equitable access to information
- Recommend easy mutual monitoring strategies
- Encourage mutual accountability in decentralized organizations
- Maintain or increase trust between community members
One method we use to maintain transparency is recording meetings and making them publicly available. This way, members are kept informed about happenings inside the TEC even if they missed the meetings. In order to achieve this, we must first make participants aware they are being recorded. When people join the TEC Discord server, they are required to accept the meeting protocols, terms, and disclaimers in order to participate in it. All are free to opt out of the server or meeting, if they choose not to be recorded.
The Transparency WG encourages all of the DAO Working Groups to document and publish clear information for the community. This complements the cultural build because our norms are not only informed through documents, but they are also reinforced through everyday practice and communication.
As the TEC is deeply rooted in Elinor Ostrom’s 8 principles for managing a commons, the Transparency WG has adopted the 4th principle as a guideline behind their actions:
Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators themselves. — E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons
For mutual monitoring in TEC, we initiated the “Transparency Audit”. All Working Groups will be audited. The results of these audits will be posted on the TEC forum to ensure the community is monitoring itself. This audit system has been designed in such a way that all community members can participate, as well as check the accuracy of the audit reports. The Transparency WG serves as a facilitator for this audit but all members share the responsibility of monitoring the work being done in the DAO.
The Transparency WG has tested the auditing process and gathered feedback for improvement. The goal of the audit is not to impose transparency across the WGs but to provide guidance on how they can be more open, communicative, and accountable with their actions and decisions affecting the community.
The TEC community have shown their support for the audit proposal via this forum vote.
Our audit criteria touch some of the DAO attributes in the conceptual framework created by PrimeDAO:
- Manifesto and roadmap — Info availability
- Contributors — Trust level
- Decision making — Sovereignty
- Financial statement/fund management — Sovereignty
One of the requirements of mutual monitoring is realized by ensuring each working group has an up-to-date, publicly available manifesto and roadmap, allowing the scope and pace of work to be continuously monitored by the community.
Building trust is crucial. We assert that a clear definition of the tasks and roles that work towards the goals of a working group is fundamental to acknowledge the contributions made by the participants. In that way, we can give context to an agent’s behavior.
Sovereignty represents the capacity of each working group to have a certain autonomy in decision making processes and funds management. This is so that the rules of the institution favor group outcomes over individual priorities.
The Future of Transparency in TEC
The TEC looks forward to having more contributors engage in boosting transparency across the TEC community. In the long term, we envision the TEC becoming a self-accountable community. We want to share our best practices with other DAOs and provide tools to promote transparency and mutual monitoring as a consistent and fair practice across the wider network. After all, accountability is one of the primary ingredients that make interactions in DAOs possible.
Appendix:
Following the transparency practices in the TEC, we want to inform everyone that the Gravity Conflict Management training has graduated its inaugural class of Gravitons! 🎉
The Graviton training empowers individuals to become Conflict Management representatives in the TEC and their communities. Gravitons completed an 8-session course that included training in nonviolent communication, theories of conflict transformation, negotiation techniques, soft governance insights and role plays, with a deep dive in the conflict transformation process that Gravity is trying to implement. Gravitons also committed to certain exigencies including self-determination, competence, confidentiality and professional responsibility.
The TEC applauds all of the Gravity participants, instructors, and community supporters on a groundbreaking cultural implementation. Here are the Discord handles of the 1st Gen Gravitons, feel free to approach any of these people or complete the Gravity Typeform to mediate and transform conflictive situations in your community.
@Zeptimus, @LeonS, @Ygg_anderson, @Juankbell, @Tam2140, @JessicaZartler, @Sjdthree, @Griff, @Santigs, @Dysbulic, @RafaelCalcada, @Durgadas, @Metaverde, @Dexvicente, @Mateodaza, @Dandigitally, @Liviade
🌱 Join the Community 🌱
We warmly welcome you to join and share:
👋 Pop by our Discord or Telegram channels, introduce yourself and share what you are working on
☎ Say hi on our weekly community calls, Thursdays at 2 pm EDT (DST) / 8pm CET on our general voice channel on Discord — add it to your calendar
🤗 New to TEC? We have an AMA dedicated to answering community questions each Wed. at 11 am EDT (DST) / 4 pm CET on our general voice channel on Discord — add it to your calendar
💸 Submit a proposal for funding for your TE project
📑 Read more about our working groups and join one
📣 Follow us on Twitter & Medium to stay up to date on the upcoming hatch
Token Engineering Commons members are also eligible to receive CSTK tokens from the Commons Stack for their Praise. To receive the tokens, members must apply to join the Trusted Seed. For any questions, reach out to @Liviade @GriffGreen @JessicaZartler on our Discord or Telegram.
This article was written by Ivy, Juan, and Zeptimus, with edits from Tamara, Nate, Mitch, and Chuy.
