A DAO’s Center of Gravity | Rafa the Builder

Even if members’ paths to engagement within a DAO may be more emergent or unpredictable in nature, DAO designers and operators still have important top-down roles to play as arbiters of the possibility spaces within their respective communities.

DAOs are playgrounds for exploring design challenges in areas like governance, organizational structure, community incentives, personal sovereignty, and professional development. But even with an emphasis on exploration, creating engagement is hard; it requires an opt-in system and self-directed members who are accountable and striving to level up.

Does the DAO need a mechanism that is decentralized, or is some centralization compatible with your incentives? There are excellent tools when you need incentives to be decentralized, and excellent tools when you can accept a more centralized approach. The answer for a well established DAO is likely to be different from a new one, as are the corres... See more

Communicating a shared purpose helps to set expectations for participation and fosters organizational health. As opposed to being everything to everyone, a DAO needs to understand what drives its community and serve that community well in accordance with its mission. This first step lays the foundation for a strong community ethos, which facilitate... See more

Does the DAO need a mechanism that is decentralized, or is some centralization compatible with your incentives?

When not fantasizing about the next 1000x moonshot, many crypto-natives dream about how DAOs will transform the way people collaborate. DAOs are imagined as flat and fluid organizations, the opposite of the rigid, pyramid-like structures dominating the corporate world today—an organization where every stakeholder gets to speak their mind and be hea... See more

DAOs will likely become large networks with shared incentives and coordination tools, made up of smaller units (which can still be quite bit) that act in a more directed and centralized way.

Rather than starting with a focus on investing, we foresee more DAOs starting first as ‘service DAOs’ — organizations that aggregate high-quality practitioners under one community to provide services to third parties (engineering, audit, design, legal, research, treasury management, etc.) in exchange for project ownership.