hiro piece | State of the DAOs
You're reading State of the DAOs, the high-signal low-noise newsletter for understanding DAOs.
Audience: Have made the jump into a DAO or want to make jump, but are looking for help on how to get started. Curating high quality content from prominent DAOs for understanding and getting a handle on the DAO ecosystem. Goal to move reader from newbie to an active, engaged member.
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Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (authors)
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Editorial
Educational content (what is a DAO, how to get engaged/ join a DAO, what are common DAO tools, what is consensus)
Headline:
One piece a week, 750-1000 words
6000 BANK Bounty each issue
Google doc
Ecosystem Takes
🔥 and 🧊 insights from across the DAO ecosystem
From Closed Doors to Public Forums: A Lesson for DAOs from OpenAI (Quilia)
Author: Drew Coffman
🔑 Insights: In the recent wake of OpenAI's recent turmoil, parallels with DAOs highlight a shared struggle between traditional corporate structures and decentralized autonomous organizations in addressing governance challenges. Despite differences, both models grapple with defining roles, power dynamics, and decision-making.
Bullet Points:
- Traditional corporations often lack genuine communal ownership, while DAOs prioritize community, transforming members into active contributors.
- Both models face similar challenges: defining roles, balancing power dynamics, and ensuring effective decision-making.
- DAOs aim for transparent decision-making, but implementation complexities persist.
- The OpenAI incident underscores the importance of integrating the collective voice into an organization's essence, whether centralized or decentralized.
The OpenAI staff exit serves as a vivid example of community influence, emphasizing the vital lesson that an organization's future must be shaped by those actively contributing, whether in an 80-billion dollar company or a decentralized collective.
Open Problems in DAOs (Vi-Fi)
Author: name [embed twitter profile]
🔑 Insights:
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) first began to surface in discussions of the blockchain community around 2013, when people imagined them as digital substitutes for traditional organizations. High-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled through a new data set or by applying tools and ideas from existing research fields such as political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational science range from granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws.
- Full transparency is often disadvantageous in strategic settings and can be counterproductive in social settings when it reduces the incentives for participation.
- Human-computer interaction can help design better interfaces and systems through which members and stakeholders organize their decentralized communities.
- Lack of limited liability is a major concern for DAO participants, as is the potential liability arising from governance participation.
- Understanding DAOs as complex adaptive systems (CAS) presents opportunities to study properties such as path dependency, sensitivity to initial conditions, emergent changes, and episodic shifts.
- Applying lessons from political philosophy will offer insights into the complexities of the digital public sphere, civic foundations of discourse, and legitimacy in group action.
Valuing Governance Tokens (Angelspeaks)
Author: UDHC
🔑 Insights:
The Ethereum ecosystem is versatile and widely recognized for its utility. Behind this system are governance tokens that are used to influence the trajectory of online projects. These tokens have no direct monetary value attached to them to prevent a split intention between realizing value and governing.
- There are no direct incentives for contributors on a project however, holding tokens allows one to participate through governance, become a paid contributor, and have a say in the decision-making process.
- Governance tokens derive value through second-order effects. Community members who got attracted by the novelty of a project must have the bandwidth to participate for governance to work.
- Governance apathy is an inherent problem faced by communities. A solution to be explored would be rewarding contributors through structured payments for participating voters. This program creates a defined benefit for participants actively disincentivizing apathy.
The Promise and Perils of Corporate Governance-by-Design in Blockchain-Based Collectives: The Case of dOrg (Warrior)
Author: name [embed twitter profile]
🔑 Insights:
Summary 2-3 sentence
- Bullet key points
DAO Spotlight:
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Summary
Article summaries (1500 each x10):
Newsletter copy edit (4000):
Headline editorial (6000 + 50 USDC):
Content editor for headline editorial (6000, or 2 x 3000):
Design (5000):
DAO Spotlight (1500):
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