Go Fork Yourself - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Most (if not all) governance mechanisms in crypto today revolve around some sort of implementation of the one-token-one-vote concept, akin to token-weighted direct democracy or shareholder democracy.

In other words, internet-native governance is no longer just a reflection of decisions but a process of decision-making itself that actively builds relationships, gets people excited about shared goals, and increases the probability of completing these goals successfully. In that sense, the key part of governance to measure isn’t the vote, but the ... See more

The goal shouldn’t be to recreate offline governance, online, after a period of trial-and-error. Internet-native organizations can’t and shouldn’t operate like geographic governments because they don’t face the same constraints. Once online governance models evolve past a certain point, they should be both different from and superior to offline one... See more

The recent debate over use cases in crypto has laid bare a hard truth: web3 isn’t as good at doing the things that web2 companies do as web2 companies are. That’s fine. Of course people aren’t impressed by DAO governance, and rightly point out that it’s just a messier implementation of ideas that already exist; recreating existing structures on-cha... See more

Gamifying governance means that the point of governance is no longer the outcome that we arrive at, but the process of governance itself—just like the point of playing a game is to play the game itself.

Viewed through that lens, governance mechanisms might become less defensive – focused less on protecting against hacks that threaten the entire DAO – and more offensive and fun – focused more on governance as a means of entertainment, social discovery, and propagation.

What if we viewed the goal of DAO governance not as a way to agree on a limited number of decisions proposed from the top, but as a way to force people to disagree on a whole host of decisions proposed by the community—so that larger groups that are unwieldy to coordinate could continue dividing into smaller, more efficient ones while building valu... See more

Because ultimately, this is the promise of forking: to get people to disagree and then find their subcommunity where they're aligned and can create their own version of a project. Good governance is, in effect, a kind of web3 social network—the basis of social graphs for people to find others who share their interests and pursue those in communitie... See more

Think about Twitter here or any other major web2 social networks. They’re kind of governance platforms. Each like is a vote on content to express that you approve it, would like to see more content like it, and would like others with your interests to see it as well. What is crucial is that these networks institutionalize the two major components o... See more

The real promise of DAO governance might be forking: using governance to get people to disagree and through the process, discover subcommunities where they're aligned and create their own version of a project. Forking, in that sense, is the ultimate form of decentralization. And it enables governance to become the basis of social graphs where peopl... See more