A Guide For Designing Online Community Governance

For networks that aim to be community owned, there should be some form of codetermination at the outset, allowing community proxies or representatives to be involved in treasury-related decisions -- particularly around token allocation.

Theoretically, governance should be structured in a way that both focuses on the primary users who are the most engaged in the community as well as the largest token holders. A simple mechanism for this may be that governance can be split past just token allocations and instead issued like multi-class stocks, whereby ownership and voting rights are... See more

Good decentralized network governance is one that steers the network through its various stages of development towards more innovative and socially useful functions, while adequately resolving conflicts between different stakeholders participating in or affected by the network.

Structure is especially important in instances when members don’t follow community guidelines or aren’t aligned with the DAO’s mission and operations. Core contributors rely on guardrails to “offboard” members in these instances, and they’ve shared that it’s easier to do when guardrails are created and implemented early on. Without them, offboardin... See more

While new models for collective organizing will continue to emerge and evolve, it’s likely that the most successful among them will include some combination of the following: one-member one-vote governance, tokens as ownership, community investment, liquidity for contributors, and bootstrapping through on-chain contributions.

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.