Course Learning Materials

IOTA DAO Pioneers – Session Five – Dec 2021 (Source link)

We took inspiration from Stephen Reid (@daoist321) How to DAO course, but harmonized content and adjusted it to the needs of our IOTA community.

Session 5

We are sadly coming to an end….

How to “finally” DAO?

The governance areas that are common to all DAOs are:

Collective asset ownership and management. DAO treasuries and balance sheets should function like decentralized corporations with considerations of assets and liabilities, liquidity, income, and where to allocate financial resources.
Risk management for assets. Volatility, price, and other market conditions necessitate continuous monitoring.
Asset curation. From collected artwork to collateral for lending, all DAO assets benefit from goals and processes around curation.

One should form a DAO only when it is clear that all of these governance areas are demanded by a community.

It is important to note that while a DAO might focus on a subset of these activities, it really needs to provide all three functions. For instance, suppose that a cultural DAO owns an asset that it suddenly has the opportunity to earn proceeds or yield from. Even if the DAO completely ignored risk management until that point (e.g. focusing solely on asset curation), it faces this challenge upon such a sale.

But….. how to get started….

Vision and Mission

This may be the most important but often most overseen aspect of starting a successful project. Defining the scope and mission of a project is crucial to its sustainability. Failing in this can lead to a failure of the whole project.

Take your time and define what you are aiming to do. This usually starts in a group chat of the core initiators of a project. You create a vision of what the DAO should look like in the future. Try to define this in a vision document, which explains the project’s goals.

This can be anything from “Establishing a steady revenue stream for the members of the DAO through NFT minting and sales” over “collecting funds to distribute them into environmental protection projects” to “becoming one of the leading Crypto media companies through pooling talent and offering media and design services to the web3 space and other projects”.

Defining what you want to do will always determine what you don’t aim to do! Everything falling out of the scope of these initial assessments should go through the governance process to see if it is worth adding this to the project and if the majority aligns with the adjustment of the mission.

Often this process starts with a kind of a “Manifesto.” A statement of values held at the project’s core and against which every action can be measured and cross checked for alignment.

Examples:

mission/metacartel-values-mission.md at master · metacartel/mission (github.com)

We are a community dedicated to the vision of an open internet of value. A fairer and richer world for all.

We believe Web 3 will enable communities and individuals to coordinate value in highly in-efficient markets, that are otherwise unviable. While these individual markets may be small, in the aggregate, the net potential unlocked will change the fundamental economics of work, government and our way of life. The underlying theme in Web 3 is coordination. The coordination and composability of programmable money, social capital, effort and labor, debt, time, curation, financial risk, attention, content creation and everything in between. DAOs will change our fundamental understanding of what online communities are, how they coordinate and what they are capable of. These crypto-communities will become the next cultural and economic epicenters of the open internet.

This vision however will not be realised without coordination and collaboration amongst ourselves. The odds are against us, we are nothing without each other.

We aim to become an epicentre of the Web 3 movement, a hunting ground for the earliest of early ventures around decentralized applications and crypto experiments. We fund and support individuals and teams that aim to part-take in the collective effort towards this vision. We are a coordinating body, we are the connectors and fabric of the community.

MetaCartel’s mission is to accelerate and drive the mass adoption of Web 3 and the open internet of value to make the world a richer fairer place.

We aim to embody the free and open spirit of the internet as we know it. We are the weird, the outspoken, the colourful, the memeful, the inappropriate, the strange — we thrive in this chaos. Not only do we build towards our vision of Web 3, we use it ourselves, we breathe it, we embrace it and put our faith in it. We are internet first, crypto-native and purebred YOLO, we are the citizens of MetaCartel.

We are people first. It’s all about people. Bet on people, have faith, back others, believe in people. Everything we do is for the community and those around us.
We value being action oriented. Move fast and be willing.
We thrive in chaos. We are comfortable with being uncomfortable. We grow under pressure.
We back ourselves. We believe in the work we are doing.
We have fun. YOLO. We have a dancing chilli as a logo.

We are committed and here to stay, and this is how we intend to win — with people.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

mission/community-first-manifesto.md at master · metacartel/mission (github.com)

Our community comes first. We put our values, missions, and problems ahead of our solutions.

Being community first means creating something people want to be a part of and can thrive in, it means silently sacrificing individual gains for the collective good, it means prioritizing long term positive-sum outcomes. The success of our communities will entirely depend on the strength of relationships that we help foster between not only ourselves, and but amongst community members.

Being community firsts means that the relationships with each other as a community, are the most important resource we have. Our users, customers, investors, and community contributors are our peers: we are them and they are us. Oftentimes, this means allowing ourselves to be led by the community around us. It means that those around us are able to have input on key collective decisions. It means that our leaders are okay with not always being in charge.

Great communities are co-created together.

Being community first is about building out in the open. You can only mobilize and empower a community to contribute when information flows efficiently and freely. Our future vision and direction are decentralized, iterative and driven by its members, not premeditated. Our success will emerge from the community’s own willingness to contribute, self organize and collaborate. Our strengths lie in being flexible and tolerate of the chaos that comes along with community ownership.

Being community first means that we always strive to acknowledge and reward those who have contributed. We provide opportunities to value-aligned individuals who want to contribute no matter who they are or where they are from. We get excited when others create value before we can. We believe the project’s success is determined by the community members’ standards. Not numbers nor anything else. We believe in community wellbeing, happiness, and productivity.

Being community first is following our heart, using our head, and listening to our gut.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

soonaverse-dao/MANIFESTO.md at main · soonlabs/soonaverse-dao (github.com)

SoonLabs is a collaboration between dedicated professionals, skilled in navigating the constant tension between invention and production to find ways to create, build, and get things done. We have different backgrounds, skills, and experiences, but share a singular goal, a shared vision, a common mantra – together we can build the impossible.

Our current “impossible” is building a more equitable world through decentralization. A world where centralized systems have NOT concentrated society’s influence, power and wealth into the hands of an infinitesimally small number of individuals and organizations.

Decentralization will enable us to avoid cronyism and chaos. Where we are, what we’ve done, and how we’re SEEN is based on merit not image, value not celebrity.

Like the DAOs we create, we believe that contributions should be judged without bias, blind to color, class, and creed, where every vote counts, where “we” is stronger than “me”, and organizations are equal and flat because that’s the way they should be.

We believe that privacy isn’t just a cloak, it’s a shield, and an anonymous voice is still a voice. DAOs must have trust, they must have reputation for members to create meaningful connections, so when people gather they become makers not mobs.

Your voice matters and NO ONE should demand a fee for expressing your opinion, no one should force you to pay to exercise your right to vote, decentralization must be an enabler not a wall.

Our DAOs will bring the change the world needs, by spreading the power of every decision across 7.7 billion points of humanity, where everyone’s an influencer, because everyone has influence.

Ask WHO we need. We’ll say, YOU.

Ask HOW can it be done. We’ll say, TOGETHER.

Ask WHERE it will happen. We’ll say, RIGHT BEFORE YOU EYES.

And then ask us WHEN. No, ask us WEN and we will say SOON, because THAT is always our answer.

Creating a structure / organization

As long as you are in the initiation phase and don’t have a community, you will be a centralized Team aligning on the same goals. You will move fast and efficiently and communicate openly and effectively in this small circle. You want to “get your baby” going and growing.

But, you should already work on a plan for the subsequent phases.
When do you include new members, and how?
How do you scout for new team members?
What can you offer them?

As soon as it comes to making decisions, have tools in place:

Simple polling bots in your discord can work very well in a small group if you want to stay in private for now.
Soonaverse polling if you are okay with being public visible already.

If you go public with your idea, you will find interested and engaged community members:

How can you leverage their skills for the project?
How to incentivize them?
How to keep them engaged?
How much control and ownership are you willing to give away already to your community in this early stage?

As soon as you build up some community engagement, you may need to think about governance and power distribution.

Are you issuing a token? – Check with a crypto lawyer for security and legal setup.
Choose a flexible governance model that may allow you changes in the future.
Revisit your governance decisions and structures regularly (6 months) and be prepared and open-minded, accepting failures in the initial setups. Be ready to change and adjust to how your project grows and evolves. Nothing should be set in stone forever.
But also, don’t overengineer things in the beginning.
It may be wiser to start with a simple governance/voting structure and improve the system along the way with input from your community, then spend weeks and months with fancy algorithms in your initial setup.