Committees in DAOs: The Exclusion Problem
Do people remember Clubhouse? It was the hot thing for a while: a voice-only chat platform, copied by Twitter Spaces. When Clubhouse came around, “everyone” wanted an invitation. The Clubhouse creators wanted to control the quality of the people joining, so they made it invitation-only. Of course, because the founders were Silicon Valley millionaires and tech bros, they knew only tech bros would get invitations at first, and they wanted to rectify it. So they decided to get entertainers, focusing on people of color, and give those entertainers invitations, so they’d get more of a mix. Ok, we’re still talking rich people, but you get the idea here.
Why is Owl talking about tech bros and entertainers? Because we are building a DAO. We are building a global brand. But guess what? Most of the world does not follow crypto. Most of the world are not English speakers. How can we create a DAO that will truly represent everyone if we are just asking our friends to join?
Spoiler alert: Owl doesn’t know the answer.
Owl was inspired to write about this after reading Grace’s last post, where she talked about the “cold start” problem. We have asked her to help us recruit DAO experts, and there you are–one person inviting their friends in the industry. Fortunately it’s an industry with a few thousand people, so within 2–3 hops, theoretically we could reach everyone involved in DAOs? Said another way, unfortunately, it’s an industry with only a few thousand people, so most people in the world will never get invited–and tomi is building something that should be of interest to everyone who wants freedom on the internet.
How do you set policy for the whole world? Well, you start with the team you have. From one Owl we now have half a dozen people involved, and they have been discussing how to bring in more people–so it all starts with committees.
Committees of moderation
At the Metafest, our friends from RnDAO created a workshop where people could choose to work on one of the problems that tomi will be facing. Many of them chose to work on the issue of content moderation. There are two aspects of content moderation: content moderation policy and content moderation execution. Groups exploring both issues wanted teams.
One group explored how to set a chemical weapons content moderation policy. They didn’t agree on whether there should be any censorship of this information, but they at least did agree it was a good use case to try as an example.
First, they agreed there should be a committee of experts to set the policy. Where would these experts come from? Well, they would be elected by the tomi participants. That could be a Pioneer, a TOMI token holder, or someone with a domain name NFT.
OK, but wait. There’s a problem. How do experts apply to be on the committee? They fill out an application form. Who creates the form? A committee of people who decided which qualifications were required to be on the expert panel? But where did that committee come from? How do they know what to ask on the questionnaire? Is that committee from the tomi team or tomi Pioneers or tomi DAO members? But wait, how did that committee come into being?
You see the problem. It comes back to the top level of picking that first committee. Of course, it’s going to start with us: myself, the half-dozen people joining now, and the people who join in the next few months. The good news is that if you get in now, you are in a good position to RULE THE WORLD! BWAHAHAHAHAH! OK, not exactly rule the world, but set policies that will set out the initial starting conditions for the tomiNet.
With great power comes great responsibility
We would like to do this wisely. When the initial DNS came into being, there was one guy, Jon Postel, in charge of the domain names. It took years before an organization was created to take this responsibility out of the hands of one man. And while it was done in a benevolent and fair manner, we are living with the consequences of this today. The internet itself was the brainchild of the US Department of Defense, and it remains in the control of mostly US-based agencies and organizations.
The tomiNet needs to avoid this issue, and we aren’t sure exactly how to do it. Everyone is corruptible in the end, even Owls. Therefore, we are working hard to distribute power before we even launch the tomiNet. The proposal by Grace Rachmany and Moritz Beirling helps us along the way. It already calls for at least 20 people to get involved and be paid from the DAO treasury for their participation. From those 20, we are hoping to have at least a few who can become stewards and start to manage parts of the treasury or subteams. This will allow for expansion of the community to include more participants.
Representing the people who benefit from tomi
Although the proposal has named a group of multinational people, there are two main disappointments for us at tomi. One is that there are very few females in the group–although the Metafest had a good representation of women, and of course Grace is female, they did not name very many women in the efforts. It has always struck us as unfair that the people who are managing and dominating the decisions at social media companies are predominantly male, particularly with some of the social media platforms that are used predominantly by females.
We are committed to rectifying that situation, and therefore we are requiring that all committees and open discussions have at least 40% women on the panels and design sprints. This was inspired by several friends we know who have committed to turning down speaking opportunities at events where women are not fairly represented, as well as laws requiring equal representation. The tomi team is quite male-dominated, though we have females and of course Owl goes by they/them pronouns. But it is clear to me as the advocate for democracy that it is my responsibility to make sure we start in the right direction. Trying to get equal representation later is more difficult, because once the culture has been set in place, it is not easy to change.
The second disappointment is the dominance of people from the Global North. We know that, once launched, tomiNet will appeal the most to people who are in countries where censorship is a real problem. Censorship is in vogue everywhere, of course, and we see the trends increasing in Western countries as well, but we think our first target audiences will be more in the Global South where restrictions on world wide web are interfering with free commerce. Therefore, we have asked to find a community manager who has language skills to connect with at least one major market outside of the English-speaking world. This might be Spanish or Arabic or Hindi–as long as we can reliably expand beyond the Eurocentric team that is inevitable because of the experts’ location in Europe.
Other measures of transmission
For myself, the Owl, it is my goal to be able to turn over the tomiNet to the DAO participants by the end of 2025. We are toying with ideas about term limits for the initial teams as well. It’s not clear how to set the right policy. Sometimes it’s important to have the seed team be involved because they have the knowledge and commitment. Sometimes it’s important to have them move on so that power doesn’t become centralized. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Another area where we think that we can decentralize is to create interfaces and protocols rather than rules and regulations. For example, the tomiNet will be available through tomi’s Atomic Browser. If we release the specifications, anyone could create their own browser to access tomiNet. Similarly, we are thinking about kinds of filters that users could install to determine their own censorship policy. It’s easy to imagine how someone might want to use a different browser/search engine/filter combination at home and at work. We think that there can be technical solutions that push decisions out of the DAO to the end-user.
What else? We’d love to hear from you. Do you have ideas about how to create the DAO specifications? Do you have ideas about progressive decentralization? Please join us. We have opened a few Discord channels specifically devoted to discussions on the DAO. So what are you waiting for?
Join the conversation!
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