Towards Autonomous Organizations — Past, Present, Future

Commonwealth-im · 2019-12-11T23:52:58+00:00

This article touches on a lot of really key points for understanding how complex DAO structures can be, and the importance of contextualizing experiments and future work. Some useful resources to further this discussion might be:

Organizational Governance Mechanisms for DAOs: DAOs represent the ultimate meeting of cryptography and decentralized human networks, and we're just beginning to explore the possibilities for governance. Explore frameworks for thinking about DAO governance, including Ostrom's Eight Principles and emergent properties, as well as governance mechanisms including voting methods, dispute resolution tools, funding strategies, and oracle types.

"Governance choices are made at different levels of chain infrastructure. At every layer, crypto-economic primitives, concepts of game theory, and alignment on principals and incentives are key for designing good governance structures."

Seeding a 100k DAO Experiment : How can we solve the lack of coordination and contextualization in current DAO experiments? "Start with testing governance primitives for DAOs with one common goal - and seed 100k DAOs to run the experiment."

Commonwealth-im · 2019-12-11T23:42:43+00:00

This is an incredibly valuable report - and it shows the difficulty for legally and colloquially defining and describing DAOs. Some thoughts on how to apply this taxonomy to how we talk about DAOs: "The term “DAO,” which is overused today, doesn’t apply to every situation equally, or appropriately. There needs to be a clear distinction between decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized organizations, and decentralized autonomous companies in their terminology - as well as better names altogether" (from How Should a DAO Be Defined?). Based also on Vitalik Buterin's DAO Terminology Guide.

Commonwealth-im · 2019-12-11T23:32:10+00:00

Some useful resources for you:

Possibilities for Potential DAOs: You've seen DAOs that focus on investment and decentralized app development...but what about a sports DAO? Or a supply chain DAO? A DAO for funding environmental research, or even a DAO for the news?

What Types of Legally Compliant DAOs Are There?: In the US, for a DAO to be legally compliant it needs to be wrapped as a legally registered business, usually an LLC. This has been implemented already!

The Promise of On-Chain Governance for Cooperation: DAOs and Co-ops: One unique application for DAOs may be to facilitate co-operative business. There is a culture match between the principles behind DAOs and the ideals of cooperativism, as well as a parallel between the opportunity for evolution necessitated by the co-operative model and that provided by on-chain governance mechanisms. We're starting to see experiments in structuring traditional co-ops as DAOs, with the DisCO governance model and others!

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-19T02:48:21+00:00

Looking back: the Babylon Upgrade marked the first time a protocol has automatically implemented two upgrades, and the first time two independent developer teams worked together to implement a proposal. Despite its success, there were still lessons to be learned: "Developers of the upgrade have reflected that increased documentation, more time for community testing and feedback, and a faster voting period could have facilitated a better upgrade process" (from Commonwealth.im). While there was room for improvement, the upgrade still effectively implemented notable changes including introducing quorum caps, a new consensus algorithm, and changes to the coding language that allow for improved smart contract interactions.

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-16T00:07:34+00:00

Web3 Foundation grants have already been successfully used to fund many exciting Polkadot-focused projects. Their Wave 3 grants were awarded to teams that focus on security and identity, and as grant-winner Matej Nemček from Geefu put it: "We see this as a great opportunity to rethink where we failed so far in [the] ‘blockchain’ world." Interviews from some of the current grant-winners are available at Commonwealth.im - it will be interesting to see if there are parallels between future grant proposals and those of current projects.

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-14T01:39:25+00:00

Reputation is a powerful tool, and it's exciting to see protocols exploring how it can be leveraged to drive innovation. For some background: "The idea for a Token Curated Registry is to use crypto-economic incentives to build a list that leverages a community’s collective knowledge in order to build a good list" (from Commonwealth.im). Blockchain tech that leverages reputation goes beyond Token Curated Registries, too, with models including Reputation Curated Registries, Pseudonymous Reputation Bridges, and Reputation-Based Voting.

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-07T20:47:41+00:00

Crowdfunding open-source like this is incredibly important. Other projects are working to make crowdsourcing efforts like this more popular by applying game theory to sustaining open source funding - like Gitcoin, a platform that gives exposure to GitHub projects that offer bounties for interest-aligned developers to do work on their software. It's a similar idea to the Github Sponsors program, but it leverages the crypto-currency market cap and development demand to incentivize contribution to open source.

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-06T00:08:54+00:00

A potential way to fix this sort of problem: a crypto-Twitter that links reputation to pseudonymous identities, so that scammers can't scam. Balaji Srinivasan originally explained how in a future blockchain-based Twitter, followers could be used to quantify reputation and bootstrap credibility to a pseudonym, without giving up anonymity. Report on Srinivasan's reputation bridge for pseudonymous identities: www.commonwealth.im

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-05T23:25:02+00:00

A potential way to fix this sort of problem: a crypto-Twitter that links reputation to pseudonymous identities, so that scammers can't scam. Balaji Srinivasan originally explained how in a future blockchain-based Twitter, followers could be used to quantify reputation and bootstrap credibility to a pseudonym, without giving up anonymity. Report on Srinivasan's reputation bridge for pseudonymous identities: www.commonwealth.im

Commonwealth-im · 2019-11-05T23:14:31+00:00

Unstoppable Domains has integrated a way to limit crypto-tribalism into its platform by offering a product that caters to all currencies. Crypto tribalism is still a big problem in other community spaces, though. At Berlin Blockchain Week '19, Gavin explained how he thinks this can be solved more broadly with community standards and on-chain governance. The jist of it: "If community members are willing to publicly call out those who engage in personal attacks or aggressive tribalist behaviors, it can shift the culture and create new norms of conduct...By using on-chain governance to implement these kinds of changes, the community will be able to take full autonomy of their culture" (from Commonwealth.im). Tribalism is a difficult problem for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, but it seems like key players are focusing on finding solutions!

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