Evolutionary Organizations

Many DAOs have struggled to create a governance process that balances agility with security. Developers need to be able to build and iterate quickly without lengthy debates happening every time code is shipped while the community needs the power to stop bad actors. The following is a framework that employs multiple governance strategies to maximize... See more

Of course, it’s not all fun and games, either — DAOs, after all, are not just an abstract crypto concept, but systems of people. And while they create new models for human coordination around shared principles or goals, they also present new challenges for effective governance, day-to-day execution, and scaling.

However, anyone that has worked within a DAO in the past year knows this is rarely the case. In reality, many DAOs operate using socialware, relying on documented practices and hoping there is sufficient human attention and coordination to follow these written rules.

Since DAOs are blockchain-based organizations that usually are not tied to a corporate entity, they leave a lot of room for rapid experimentation in organization and incentive design. Members can collectively source an idea, funnel collectively managed resources toward shared goals, iterate, and ship with rapid speed.

In summary, eight imagined qualities of decentralized autonomous organizations are autopoietic, alegal, superscalable, executable, permissionless, aligned, co-owned, and mnemonic. Drawn from observation, these qualities trace desires for interdependence growing in the cracks of legacy institutions, as well as the dubious inheritance of cybernetic d... See more

We propose that DAO’s should first ask the following question: