Land of the DAO — Renzo D’Andrea
DAO is a useful tool for community organization and self-government . As a service designer and user experience researcher, my job is to listen to and understand the deeper motivations behind the technology movement, because these provide the basic principles for designing solutions and tools.
Throughout 2021, I was fortunate to gain some practical experience in the web3 field, and came up with a special belief: the two necessary conditions for DAO to thrive are the ability to coordinate values and the self-awareness of personal attitudes.
A new narrative of the strange economy
In the next two sections, I will explain in detail why I think DAO is an ideal tool for these tasks… If you are already familiar with DAO, you can skip these and skip to the third part.
The community needs a narrative to support fair finance, truth, and meaning in a complex world. In general, the connectivity of our world exposes us to many decision-making and coordination scenarios. Our influence depends on how we communicate with each other. Therefore, the earth has heard our voice and asked for wisdom to inject vitality into progress and bring hope to systemic challenges.
As individuals, we cannot have a major impact on issues that have a huge impact on us, such as climate change, the economy, coronavirus, social media misinformation, and encryption. Our consciousness is overwhelmed. As Pandora’s paper proves, the structure of political power has been destroyed. It is very clear that this must be changed.
The existing web2 platform is only to slowly tap more value to serve minority shareholders. This is turning into distrust of the market, and users will leave or cancel the platform. The capitalist financial system and its unjust machinery have created an unstable wasteland and a deteriorating planet. The technocratic environment provides a silent patronage effect, such as Facebook Meta. Facebook is evading the responsibility of changing its business model. A different name is riding a new horse of virtual reality innovation that does not guarantee user data protection and misinformation. But it is about to change. Organizations are slowly moving from web2 to web3. Braintrust is a good example of a talent network owned and controlled by users.
Web3 is the next evolution of capital ownership . Web3 provides incentives for communities through decentralized governance to create and share value within a given platform and ecosystem. Individuals can make a difference, can see and feel how others benefit from it and receive rewards. Then the entire community flourishes and motivates others. This is what defines the concept of decentralized governance for me.
Unleash community influence through smart contracts
One of the places where you can practice and learn about decentralized governance is DAO . A community is a place where people express themselves and organize themselves to decide what to do and how to do it. This is governance. Around a mission, a group of people decides to coordinate binding values and rights around a purpose and resources.
On the front end, DAO provides a way for the community, where individuals handle continuous learning by sending out ideas and feedback. And you want to be rewarded. Therefore, in the community, you vote on actions, proposals, or grant power to some continuous members. Participation and its consistency are at the core of the reward system and incentive design. More importantly, this happens in a bottom-up environment. With all the above content, with a sense of belonging, your governance or incentive measures are encoded in a token, for example, this is issued by the Ethereum network. On the back end, the Ethereum computer network is the infrastructure that allows cryptocurrency payments without stopping. Likewise, it is responsible for community rules—such as contracts—about voting or resource allocation. So here, the smart contract is the code.
Without central authority and bureaucracy, it is still an organization and can be autonomous . You can join DAO through Discord and start a journey. By opening a metamask account, you will get a complete experience of holding tokens. You can work, invest or place bets in different scenarios, with rights attached.
If we are willing to forget and learn with the courage and attitude, as individuals, we can gain authorization through our own decisions and act for collective intentions-and still make money.
The energy field in my DAO experience: Aragon and Governauts
My tour of the Web3 space in the Aragon community is experimental and insightful. I am learning the Aragon technology stack and how the Aragon incentive system aligns with my values: thorough gentleness, smooth transparency and continuous structured experimentation. Aragon provides innovative governance tools for communities and organizations. The open source stack displays DAO creation on Aragon Client or Aragon Govern, interacts with your community on Aragon Voice, resolves disputes at Aragon Court, and conducts enterprise-level voting on Vocdoni. The continuous development of the Aragon community provides an opportunity to reposition itself between its mission and community interaction.
Aragon project mind map — Renzo D’Andrea
As the Aragon Network (AN) DAO takes shape in the summer of 2021, I joined the Aragon Ambassador Program to gain knowledge and interact with the Discord community with my skill set. Discord itself is not much different from Slack, Whatsapp, and Confluence. In addition to a more attractive user experience, the core difference lies in the reward system associated with Discord events. However, as part of the Ambassador Program, Aragon integrated the reward system with Source Cred. It is in this pilot that we have experienced how to reward others fairly and demand our own rewards.
The SourceCred algorithm tracks your actions through your profile handles on Discord, forums and Github. Credit is the score as a unit of measurement. It is not transferable. ” Weight ” is a set of rules that describes which types of contributions are worth and how much credit. ” Grain ” is a reward, a Crypto currency, which is associated with the creds in a given project and can be transferred. ‘Grain’ can be exchanged for AN tokens. Holding AN tokens creates a sense of belonging, voting, proposing proposals, and participating in dispute resolution. In AN DAO.Cred, scores are affected by different parameters, such as channel weights, user role weights, platform weights, and credit scores of the sender. This is just a glimpse. The tool is in a feedback loop mode because it needs improvement.
However, using SourceCred, I experienced acceptance and reward for my actions. We have made a series of plans that may be transformed into projects that need to be funded while satisfying collective intentions: meaningful appeals, launching Crypto ceremonial dialogues, sharing thought leadership content and Gitbooks. I believe that the latter will create a series of self-development, and community participation will expand with the work created by the community and the work created for the community.
The experience of triggering decision-making and assuming responsibility in the group opens up a reflection on leadership. Even for a decentralized competition, I believe that healthy leaders are needed, just like a beacon. Perhaps in a six-month cycle, the guild and the leader will take turns in charge to advance the structured experiment. On the DAO’s table, deciding what might be a hot topic that both members and creators are affected. For many DAOs, facing the right problem is a very challenging scenario.
Governauts: Enabling the adoption of crypto governance through action research
Another ongoing research project in Web 3 that I am involved in is about decentralized governance: Governauts. The name that sounds like space travel has attracted people’s attention. Taking a step back: I gave a speech on platform design and decentralized governance in April last year. This is a bridge with six like-minded… the Governor! In June 2021, the Governauts research group came alive. Since then, we have invested time and energy every week to provide exciting content to the community so that they can understand decentralized governance. Through Gitcoin grants, we have raised community support to serve participatory learning activities. In addition to other seminars, the current and latest exciting activity is the DAO Reward System Research Project. At the same time, in November, I designed and launched a survey to listen to and learn about the Governauts community on Telegram. The goal is to identify the Governauts prototype, discover learning opportunities and listen to the problems, in order to promote the adoption of decentralized governance. Of the 180 people in the Telegram channel, 26 members completed it (14%). In the DAO reward system assembly event, I presented the qualitative survey results of the Governauts community. In short, the study identified three main continuing needs:
1. Society: cultural construction, values.
2. Coordination and coordination: workflow and resource allocation, users.
3. Experience: the simplicity of the front-end-ease of use.
Another related area of research is the main issue of adoption. Below I share a slide, which contains the story of the framework DAO leaders and contributors:
Onboarding Community Challenge: Dialogue with Bankless DAO
The third project that prompted me to think about it recently is Bankless DAO. The project took off from the airdrop-think of it as an evolution of ICO-rapidly developing in the DAO field. I contacted Marco Moshi, the head of Polygon DAO and Bankless Guild coordinator, to share questions and visions about the evolution of the space.
Marco emphasized that the key work to be done in terms of behavior and attitude, first of all, is to manage the cultural direction in the discordant community channel. We all agree that DAO does not exist to make you rich and powerful.
In our conversation, we pointed out that if DAOs are something like a “different world”, they will not be built around self, but will depend on the patience and willingness of participants to adjust and learn from failure. On the one hand, Discord lays the foundation for attracting people to quickly learn about cryptocurrency and organizational design, but as part of human characteristics, greed and arrogance may still appear in this space. This is one of the challenges facing the DAO community.
For example, onboarding is a key hot spot, where a flexible understanding of the motivations of new employees can provide direction for the learning journey. The onboarding process will struggle with the high number of cohorts. Conversely, in smaller groups, such as up to 20 people, tailor-made induction training can promote organic growth. The balance between quality and quantity may be a decisive factor in DAO’s reputation.
The DAO opportunity unleashes your ability to start from scratch. The course does not imply reputation on the spot. Others will listen to you, because your positive and consistent attitude will be reflected in the community’s response.
The challenge is to build reputation while understanding individual interests and collective influence. The reward system and incentive design are at the core of this challenge, with “as few conditions as possible”.
DAO as the creator of self-awareness
This brings me to the point I made at the beginning of the article. How all these studies led me to believe that the key factor in DAO is to harmonize values and allow people to have a personal attitude towards self-awareness.
A set of governance agreements in the community recognize that the trajectory of fundamental changes is taking place. The number of DAOs continues to grow, and those who make valuable, rewarding participation and easy access in governance will be able to survive. Therefore, the onboarding process, reward system and accessibility are currently the hottest booths in the decentralized market.
DAO space seems to be the territory of Crypto underground castles, but they may become large independent land and cryptocurrency countries.
Being part of the DAO’s discourse can rekindle our intentions to formulate proposals and vote with a focused consciousness. It provides a stage where we can develop our self-awareness on a personal level while at the same time creating empathy for others in the form of cooperation. If we are willing to grasp fundamental changes, we must begin to forget and re-adjust our beliefs in order to achieve continuous learning and collective shared values.
Voyage is a symbiosis in which individualism and collectivism need to learn to coexist in harmony. This is about reactivating our relationship in terms of competition, profit, and resources. The self-organizing environment is the door to meet this challenge. Competition with new incentives can be uncomfortable, or it can be like a revelation, a sense of mystery. Think about science fiction, it’s a treasure chest of visionary changes.
Concluding remarks
Dune movies and books-I watched the movie, I am reading this book-let me connect my thinking and action points. The power of the story is to condense the power of ecological destruction, political corruption, community culture, and interstellar war to manage and control the production of spices on the planet Arakis. This spice imparts psychological power and aids in space travel.
DAO can be a new planet, the spice of self-awareness. We can compete for the “spice” by continuing to take care of the earth, re-adjusting the social model, and giving ourselves incentives to have a true attitude towards the world.
Inspired by my practical experience in the team and the community, I will continue to participate in action research and development with consistency and attitude, from the perspective of service design, in order to enhance the influence of DAO, and at the same time realize that DAO has become a pure repulsive power The expression of concentrated risk.
Against fear, Frank Herbert, Dune:
“I can’t be afraid.
Fear is a mental killer.
Fear brings total destruction and death, and I will face my fear.
I will allow it to pass me, pass me.
When it passes, I will turn my inner eyes to see its path.
There will be nothing where the fear disappears, only I will stay. “