Let's continue from DAOs, and why the usage of this crypto is for normies, cryptoids, and other identities.
Last week it was my archaeology to DaOs.
What are DAOs about? Wait for it. It is too simple.
People doing things together. So what other names we have for those? Teams, network, collectives, community, club, coop, organisation, society, clique. For the ones who are for words and communities, here are all the words. They have differences in the network types and connections, but we will leave it to people who are also keen on ecosystems and networks (hello fellow👋 )
What is another word for community? | Community Synonyms - WordHippo Thesaurus
So all those things do exist, so what further DAO offers here on top of what we had?
I will tell you the story of digitalisation. We started digital 20ish years ago in our products and services first. A digital "voice", digital money transfer, digital art, then the organisations became digital. We were eventually migrating all the cloud. Enter decentralisation. It started from products and services. Most heard was Defi – decentralised finance services. We had the art moment. Decentralisation went mainstream with a craze - digital assets tokens, how we represent, store and own value. And as before, here comes next, the organisation. How could you scale decentralised organisations in a manner where there is no profound trust. Enter DAOs
Are DAOs mainly about tooling the trust? This is my first response. YES. And then there are more which I will get next.
Parentheses here
I saw this research on trust recently, the neuroscience of trust. And it is oxytocin.
http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/images/pdf-files/2004-2005/ZakatalH.pdf
Also, Trust to the algorithm. This is a thing. I remember the founder of Oxbotica, a company that focuses on self-driving cars, talking about their research almost five years ago. People would stand in front of the self-driving cars on the campus they were testing in. You would not stand in front of a person driving. They trusted the algorithm more. Think about this. How profound this is that we trust an algorithm more than a human. I am no cyber techno shaman mania, I am for human, and this behaviour is the most human thing I have heard.
Close the parentheses now, Back to DAOs.
I do not think DAOs are fully autonomous machine lords we work in, unlike what it sounds to some people. It is a roadmap, and a decentralised organisation can have layers and parts. The most important is that people do things together, and they need decentralisation in one of the categories below. So you could have layers of decentralisation, something I always advocated in my corporate job as well. You decentralise what you need, and you can layer it. You can compose it. Enter hybrid, not the chaos.
Some categories I can think of dissecting which I do not claim to be MECE. MECE principle - Wikipedia. You do not need all to be DAO, you might have some parts of it. I feel this will be helpful to the people who want to start a DAO, or corporates thinking what DAOs mean for them.
- Communication & collab tools – These are pretty mature off-chain. And most use them, and that is fine. However, if you have the other parts like voting on chain, you can integrate perhaps.
- Value representation – This is where tokens come in place, the ones that represent the work, the ones that represent the company value, remuneration. Without this, you can still be a DAO
- Value connection to the bigger pot- you might be doing things temporal, gig, long term. How do you extract the value? How do you design so that it will grow in value? Tokenomics and markets come here into play.
- Decision making – Voting algorithms and design comes into play
- History&Bookkeeping &Reporting- This is where you need everything for trust, transparency, history, retrievable facts that can not be altered. This is where crypto is a must, and the most important because that is what crypto solves uniquely
- Governance – Well, it is more than decision making or bookkeeping, I will let Grace tackle this, she has a book on it. SO, YOU'VE GOT A DAO ...: MANAGEMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY eBook : Rachmany, Grace, Houwen, Marco: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store
- Workforce – Well the autonomous in the DAO is generally and mostly not there and do not need to be. When I think of this, I think FETCH.AI, a network of economic agents that transact, sets pricing and accepts transactions. I have simplified it utmost. This also exists in Defi, where there are agents that do the actions. You might not need those, bu consists of mere humans working together and can still be a DAO. Well may be a DO :D.
Paranthesis:
You see me changing the name a bit from DAO to DO. I apologise. I'm not particularly eager to tackle the naming just yet before the tipping point. The naming of DAO will change and multiply to several things wait for it to become mainstream and marketing teams to tackle, but “what shall we call this thing ?” I feel we are still in the naive stages, we have the luxury to label these loosely coupled things with the same name which I call a "container label", like IoT, blockchain or AI.
Close the parentheses and lets go back to DAO hybrid decentralisation .
Or you could also categorise and dissect by functions to decentralise.
- Onboarding
- Training
- Delivery
- Testing
- Funding
- Strategy
- Operations
- Product development
We have already started to tackle some of these functions, mainly where the bottlenecks are such as hiring, delivery or funding. Crowdsth anyone?
I will give an example of when I had to decentralise something keeping the operation central because of the maturity of the blockchain applications for the enterprise. We built a layer where we had a distributed ledger for reinsurance admin contracts the application layer lent itself very well as well as the ownership of the nodes, however operating nodes at scale on every level maturity organisation was a showstopper. So we just had to have centralised operations where the whole product and the platform were decentralised. These types of things are fine—sorry purists.
We have so much more to think about. I want to write about what DAO as a thought challenges on what businesses are next. But we will see. What are your thoughts? Anything you want to talk about in particular?