Accelerating Good : Impact DAOs Research

Meet Cabin: Airbnb as a Network State

Deepa — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:22:24 GMT

Cabin is Airbnb reimagined as a network state. Born in the web3 era, Cabin (cabin.city) is aimed at digital nomads seeking beautiful, remote places to live/work, and immerse in local experiences. However, unlike Airbnb, where anyone can list and book, involvement in Cabin requires earning trust first that’s encoded on Ethereum.

Trust is important and Cabin solves for that through their onchain reputation system. To list and book spaces and experiences on Cabin, one must become a Cabin Citizen or receive a vouch from a current citizen.

Listen to the podcast to deep dive into how Cabin built their Network State. You can also listen on Apple or impactdaos.xyz

I chatted with Jonathan Dean, a core contributor at Cabin, to learn about what makes them different from Airbnb. He explained Cabin's unique approach: community-governed and onchain reputation feature that drives their network city. Also how they're abstracting the blockchain from the user experience and making it easy for everyone to participate in the network.

Timestamped notes of the podcast

1:15: How did JD Core Contributor Got Involved with Cabin

3:00: Cabin’s Origin

4:14: Network Reach

5:43: Cabin Vs Airbnb

7:49: Community Curating Properties

11:57: Cabin Token Allocation

14:00: Cabin Org Structure & Getting Work Done

18:02: Cabin Governance Structure

19:45: Cabin Citizen Vouching System

23:26: NFT Ticketing & Fiat Payments

25:10: Who the First Users

26:58: OnChain Reputation

27:50: Cabin’s Tech Stack

30:44: What do Cabin Neighbourhoods Mean

32:56: Cabin's Evolution

34:28: How to Book Cabin for your next nature experience

Life is always better when you're surrounded by beautiful landscapes - Jonathan Dean, Core Contributor, Cabin

Cabin’s Puerto Rico Outpost

To stay up to date on Cabin, follow them on Twitter or join their Discord.

This post is part of a series on our second Impact DAOs Research + Book update.

For any questions reach out to me on Twitter or leave a comment below.

Inside City DAO, Community-Governed City on the Blockchain

Deepa — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 17:29:11 GMT

In July, 2021 City DAO made history by becoming the first to own land on the blockchain and to govern it through DAO, boasting a treasury size of $8.5 million. This move was sparked by the landmark DAO law passed in Wyoming in 2021, which recognized DAOs as legal entities.

Notably, Vitalik Buterin and Brian Armstrong are among the early citizens of City DAO, having made their citizenship official through the purchase of Citizen NFTs.

This also made City DAO as the first to experiment with the Network State concept for the future world.

Citizen NFT holders are citizens of CityDAO, granting community access and governance.

Two years on, how has the City DAO experiment unfolded?

I spoke with Eric, an active citizen of City DAO and podcast host about the decentralized governance, learnings, and the next steps that includes acquiring more land.

The podcast below is an immersive tour into City DAO and the network state future.

As a DAO veteran, Eric also outlines the top trends and shifts taking place across the DAO landscape.

Timestamped notes from the show:

The Q&A below is an excerpt from the podcast, edited for clarity.

Deepa: How did you get into DAOs

Eric: I started deep into the tech world around 2020 during covid and lockdown year. And that led me to discovering my first DAO and learning about its principles. And I thought, "Wow, this is really interesting."

It led me, because that opened up my eyes to the concept of the network state. And in a short version to anyone that's not aware, the network state is the concept of basically a future where the world runs on decentralized networks.

I'm talking about cities, countries voting, all politics done in a decentralized ground up, people first manner. And you really have to think and digest to what that means. It means a complete change of all politics we see on the planet today. And I thought, this is something like Bitcoin, where Bitcoin makes better money for the world. The concept of the network state and the principles in a DAO can mean better politics for the world.

And I just latched onto this concept with City DAO back in late 2021. And that led me down the journey where I'm now, supporting Kraus House, Bankless and LinksDAO and a whole bunch of other really cool DAOs that are out there.

So that's really my journey. I've been in this space for a little bit now and. Working with a lot of contributors, doing a lot of podcasting, a lot of Twitter spaces, a lot of building. We're building DAO tooling right now with our startup. We have a couple grants that are approved and this is my life and it's pretty cool to be here.

Deepa: How did City DAO get started? And what's your role in City DAO?

Eric: I discovered City DAO in late 2021 when it was already in the process of formation, and I have been deeply involved ever since. To understand how it was formed, we have to go back to the passing of the DAO Act, also known as Bill 38, by the Wyoming State legislation.

In July the new legislation came into effect, granting the DAO LLC legally enforceable rights in Wyoming, recognizing it as a decentralized autonomous organization.

This was significant because the LLC structure ensured there was no board of directors, CEO, or single individual responsible or liable for the organization. It truly embraced a decentralized framework, which was revolutionary.

At that time, Scott Fitsimones, inspired by the legislation, tweeted about buying land and transferring ownership to a DAO LLC, with governance implemented through NFTs.

The tweet gained traction due to Scott's popularity and connections. Momentum started building, and a generous individual, not necessarily an angel investor but someone with capital, supported the experiment and made it possible by providing funds.

With that funding, a small piece of non-functional land, about 40 acres, was purchased in Wyoming. This physical land exists in the real world, and anyone can visit and experience it. The purchase of the land and the remaining treasury funds were transferred to the DAO LLC corp. This generated excitement and caught the attention of the media.

City DAO ultimately embraced the direct democracy route, for better or worse, through early discussions and the core team's involvement. This means that everyone is equal and involved in decision-making. This takes us back to July, August, and September when the land was purchased, and there was a lot of buzz surrounding an NFT sale.

We released 10,000 NFTs, priced at 0.25 ETH at the time, and they sold out. Some NFTs were held back, but the majority were sold. This raised capital and led to questions about the next steps, such as what to buy and what to do next.

City DAO has explored various directions and established guilds focusing on education, operations, mission, media research, and grants.

We recently bought another piece of land in Colorado and are deliberating on our next project. However, the market downturn affected our treasury. We are also considering opportunities in Turkey and exploring interesting prospects with one of the consulates in El Salvador. There's also a strong interest in buying more land in the United States, and the decision-making process is open for anyone to participate.

As for my role, I joined a few months after the initial launch and have been actively involved since then. I'm part of the media guild and contribute to various initiatives. I'm currently working on a grant for an infrastructure project in the DAO tooling space, which is my primary focus.

City DAO is undergoing significant governance revisions and exploring ways to become more efficient moving forward. That's where City DAO stands today.

Deepa: I have a question regarding the initial NFT buyers of the 10,000 NFTs. What motivated them to purchase the NFT? Was it mainly for the Wyoming land, even though it's currently barren? Were they hoping for future development or any potential return on investment?

Eric: Firstly, it's crucial to understand that the NFT doesn't represent ownership at all. It doesn't grant any ownership of the land or the treasury. The purpose of the NFT is solely to participate in the voting and decision-making process regarding the treasury and the land.

It's essential to differentiate between ownership and governance. Therefore, there is no return on investment associated with the NFT.

When I bought my NFT, I essentially donated money to a remarkable cause and secured a voting position to influence the future direction of City DAO.

In many ways, the initial purpose and benefit of the land have already been achieved. We successfully completed the purchase, registered the court, raised funds, and established relationships with Wyoming senators. Now, we are looking ahead to what's next. This is where the real excitement begins.

I encourage anyone who has been involved since day one to explore the homeland project and join the discussions. This new piece of land presents different possibilities. It could become a co-working space, an event center, or even host a large-scale hackathon with substantial sponsorship. There are numerous options, and collectively we get to decide the future direction.

The Wyoming land has served its purpose by bringing us to this point, and now we are eager to finalize our plans for the next amazing project.

Deepa: What DAO trends are you seeing?

One of the big ones is that in 2020 and 2021, you can say the big focus seemed like direct democracy. Every single decision an organization made was put to a vote, right from the very bottom. It's an empowering concept.

The shift from being overly centralized to becoming excessively decentralized is a cycle humans have experienced numerous times in various places. It happened again in 2021 with DAOs. Everything had to be non-centralized and completely decentralized. We discovered yet again that you can't put every single matter to a vote and remain productive simultaneously. It morphs from direct democracy to a vetocracy.

A simple example would be, let's say we want to conduct a vote to run a podcast. Okay, great. When is the vote going to take place? Perhaps we should vote on when the vote will occur. But then, we need to vote on who will conduct the vote. Then we need to vote on who will manage the voting process for the upcoming vote.

Afterward, we have to decide which software to use and which to avoid, but then we need to vote on when to vote on the software to use. It culminates in a complete vetocracy, where you simply can't get anything done. There has to be a certain level of centralization.

I think many DAOs have realized that neither the direct democracy way nor direct centralization is the solution. So, what's the balance?

Currently, the trend I'm seeing is a movement away from direct democracy and towards exploring what's worked in the past. For example, what types of representative democracies could work, and how can we introduce measures into representative democracy that would be more effective than what we see today?

This concept of liquid democracy, moving away from direct democracy, seems to be the direction DAOs are heading.

Another trend is that there has been so much wheel-spinning and red tape emerging with DAO tooling and governance discussions. In my opinion, there hasn't been enough focus on simply getting things done and being productive.

As a solo bootstrapped founder who started with no capital, no support, and no connections, I had to get shit done on a daily basis every single day or die. That was the reality.

Many DAOs I'm part of spend weeks or even months deliberating over the most basic fundamental things before anything even happens.

I think there's a trend, and you could say, a pressing need, to focus more on how we just get more done in the shortest amount of time in the fairest way possible.

To listen to the full interview tune into Spotify, Apple Podcasts or impactdaos.xyz

This post is part of a series on our second Impact DAOs Research + Book update.

If you have any question reach out to me on Twitter or leave a comment below.

DAOs Are the Future of Work

Deepa — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 03:08:17 GMT

Decades ago, visionaries like Steve Jobs hinted at the future of work. However, it wasn't until in the grip of a global pandemic that we found ourselves living in this projected reality, one so radically different from our past that going back is no longer an option for many.

Kift DAO community of nomads reimagining future of living and work.

Internet-native, smart contract-enabled decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that took off in 2021 are ushering in the future.

DAOs, inherently internet and decentralized by design, are not just talking about the future of work. DAOs are living it, breathing it, and experimenting with it in real-time.

And crafting the very blueprint of the future of work.

In the summer of 2022, I embarked on a deep-dive (as a DAO) into the inner workings of 12 well-established ImpactDAOs. The goal was to understand the intricate operating structures of these novel internet-centric organizations. We spoke to 40 DAO builders. What we discovered was nothing short of extraordinary.

DAOs aren't just dismantling the old ways of creating value—they're setting the new standard for work.

Our study revealed 20 unique traits that set DAOs apart from the traditional organizations we've come to know.

DAOs are fundamentally different by design; reimagining and experimenting on the canvas of decentralized web aka web3. And changing the way we define what 'work' really means.

We believe the future will be led by DAOs powered by sovereign individuals, AI and high technology.

Short Story

A Glimpse into the High-Tech, Solarpunk Future of Work

In the radiant heart of a vibrant tropical oasis sits the Viridian Nest, an eco-café known for its living green walls, bio-solar panels, and sustainable foodprints. The tropical choir of birds outside performs a melodic symphony, harmonizing with the rhythmic keystrokes inside.

At a corner table, a girl with a crop of short hair is immersed in a world of her own, a digital nomad forging her path in this radiant future.

The cool glow of a holographic laptop screen illuminates her focused expression, her fingers deftly manipulating the 3D interface that hovers above the keyboard. A pair of advanced headphones encircles her head, their adaptive noise cancellation technology transforming the ambient café chatter into a bespoke soundscape, enhancing her concentration. The earpieces translate multiple languages in real-time, a necessity in her global line of work.

Her gaze, through smart contact lenses, takes in multiple data streams - messages, codes, and video links, all overlaid on the café's verdant reality. Yet, in her peripheral vision, she could always catch the undulating emerald ocean waves, a window to an organic world that continually energizes her digital existence.

She is an architect of words, building worlds within worlds. The digital ecosystem in front of her springs to life under her guidance, each keystroke, a brick in the expanding metropolis of the world wide web.

She's not just creating media; she's shaping societies, building the backbone of this digitally decentralized age.

From the outside, she might look solitary, but inside her headphones, she's connected to an extensive network of collaborators, all working in concert. Her voice, modulated and crisp, converses with a team spanning across multiple time zones, a symphony of progress undeterred by physical borders.

Her short hair, catching hints of the tropical sunlight filtering through the café's solar windows, is a statement of practicality and style. In her, the harmonious blend of the vintage and the futuristic finds expression - much like her surroundings.

This girl with headphones in the Viridian Nest, writing to the rhythm of the tropical breeze, represents the brave new world of work. A world unbounded by physical constraints, where creativity and connectivity shape the future, where work can truly happen from anywhere, at any time.

Here, in this green café, the future isn't just seen - it's being created.

Share the Future

How We Selected 16 Impact DAOs to Study #Season2

Deepa — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:15:07 GMT

Here are the 16 Impact DAOs we’ve selected for our second study. In our first study, we researched 12 Impact DAOs and published a book, The Definitive Guide to Impact DAOs. Our goal is to study Impact DAOs from the inside out and list them as case studies in our living book, available for free at impactdaos.xyz

Why Study Impact DAOs

Impact DAOs are the new operating framework for doing good. They are digital organizations using web3 tools for coordination and transparency. In the next couple of years, Impact DAOs will be the most natural way for people to organize around causes. It's therefore essential we study this emerging model, provide great documentation and keep the knowledge fresh as this landscape continues to evolve.

To make things a little more meta this project is itself a DAO. A decentralized collaboration by folks who, like me are curious to learn about Impact DAOs.

Selection Criteria

They need to be an Impact DAO. There are many web3 impact projects that are not DAOs. We’re interested in understanding the digital web3 powered operating framework, and therefore only DAOs are considered for this study, whose core purpose is to do good to people and the planet.
To have a diverse mix of Impact DAOs from the top 5 Impact DAO categories - Enabler, Social Impact, Climate, DeSci, Network State. Also, diversity in their sub-focus areas, country of origin, gender, growth stage etc.
Impact DAOs that have been in operation for 9 months and more as of Jan 1, 2023. We call them ‘meaty’ DAOs as they offer us a lot to learn from.
(We’ve increased the operating limit from 5 (for the last study) to 9 months. In June 2022, we had difficulty finding DAOs with 5 months of operating exp. This time we had many to choose from.)
DAOs with tangible impact. We’re interested in studying DAOs that get work done despite the decentralized community-driven approach to work.

Selection Process

We researched and crowdsourced a list of 70+ Impact DAOs. We create a pod of 5 members to screen the list as per the set criteria and to make 2 top recommendations from each of the category. The once most recommended and that met all the criteria made it into the list. Note, DAOs in certain categories are far more mature and therefore have a bigger representation.

Our 16 Selected Impact DAOs

🚀 Big Green DAO
🚀 Giveth
🚀 Lex DAO
🚀 Public Nouns
🌳 Basin DAO
🌳 Kokonut DAO
🌳 Kolektivo
🌳 Regens Unite
❤️ 40 Acres
❤️ Tampa Bay DAO
🧬 Valley DAO
🧬 Vita DAO
🌐 Cabin DAO
🌐 City DAO
🌐 Kift DAO
🌐 Priceless DAO

Scope of the Study

Our scope of study is wide and deep. The research would involve 1:1 interviews with founders and contributors to understand the structure, tokenomics, governance, funding, tooling, deliverables and impact measurement criteria.

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or here.

Top 5 Impact DAO Categories Explained

Deepa — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 03:42:59 GMT

Photo by Reinis Birznieks on Unsplash

I reviewed the mission statement of 70+ Impact DAOs and they fall into these 5 categories. Impact DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations whose core purpose is to do good for people and the planet.

The top 5 emerging Impact DAO categories and what they stand for:

🚀 Enabler

These DAOs enable impact through training, funding, and other infrastructure support. They are meta DAOs and do not directly participate in impact delivery. Examples of enabler DAOs include Gitcoin (funding), LexDAO (legal), and Impact DAO Media (research).

Enablers can be further segmented based on the service they provide such as funding, media, education, or incubator DAOs.

🌱Climate

DAOs engaged in climate change mitigation fall under this category. The current climate DAO’s focus areas include agriculture, carbon credits, land regeneration, and natural assets tokenization. Klima DAO (carbon credits), Kokonut DAO (agriculture), Basin DAO (land restoration), and United Species DAO (community resilience) are examples of climate DAOs.

❤️ Social Impact

DAOs whose mission is to improve the lives of people fall into this category. Social Impact DAOs are currently operating in the space of social and financial inclusion, hyper-local mutual aid, and humanitarian aid. Examples include Human DAO (financial inclusion), Impact Market (UBI), Ukraine DAO (disaster management), and Pact DAO (hyper-local city based mutual aid).

🧬 DeSci

DAOs in the area of scientific research, funding, and innovation. For instance, Vita DAO (longevity), Valley DAO (synthetic biology), FrontierDAO (fusion and Ag tech). Based on the nature of their core activities, DeSci DAOs can be further categorized into research publishing, funding, or scientific innovation incubators.

🌐 Network State DAOs

They are the newly emerging category of Impact DAOs formed around network states, a concept detailed by Balaji Srinivasan in his book, The Network State. Many DAOs are experimenting in this space, as the first step towards a network state is a highly aligned online community. Some network state DAOs have even acquired real-world assets, such as City DAO, Cabin DAO, and Kift DAO.

A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states. - The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan

If you are an impact DAO and haven’t registered your DAO yet fill out this 1-minute form.

If you have any questions please reach out on Twitter or here. The list of 70+ Impact DAOs will be available soon at https://impactdaos.xyz/

Meet COG ⚙️ - The Impact DAOs Tech Stack

Deepa — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 19:58:55 GMT

“What’s your tech stack?” was one of the questions we asked 12 mature Impact DAOs as part of the research for our book on Impact DAOs.

Based on the tools mentioned and from our deep understanding of the operating framework of DAOs, we introduce COG the Impact DAOs Tech Stack.

“A tech stack is a collection of technologies and tools that are used to build and run a software application or a project.” - ChatGPT

What’s COG?

COG stands for communication, operations, and governance. Impact DAOs use various tools to manage each of these three core DAO functions. We have divided the tools based on these functions. The tooling data comes from our research on 12 mature Impact DAOs, which were operational for five months or more as of June 1, 2022. We’ve split the tools based on these functions. The tooling data is derived from our research of 12 mature Impact DAOs, which were operational for 5-months or more as of June 1, 2022.

COG Stack

Communication: Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Google Meet/Zoom, Mirror

Operations: Discord, Dework/Wonder, Notion, Safe

Governance: Discourse, Snapshot, Tally, Tokens (tokens issued on blockchain Ethereum, Regen Network, Celo)

If you are interested in COG, please sign up for the newsletter as we will be diving deeper into the COG stack.

🙌 We are super thankful to Rex St John (@rexstjohn on Twitter) of ReFi Summit for his idea to create a tech stack for DAOs and for his help in coming up with a name for it.

Subscribe now

🐇Dig Deeper:

Impact DAOs Book, Ch4, Learnings and Analysis

12 mature Impact DAOs and How we Picked Them

Crypto Good

🗳 How we Picked the 12 Impact DAOs to Study

Hi Folks, For the next couple months I’ll be sharing tons of insightful information on DAOs. As part of the Impact DAOs research study, we’ve been having amazing conversations with DAO founders and contributors. We are learning a great deal about this new operating model and mindset needed to work in it. Below is how we identified the 10 DAOs for the re…

4 years ago · 5 likes · Deepa and Yvonne

Research Inquiry

The Problem with DAO Voting and How to Fix It

Deepa — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 14:31:01 GMT

In DAOs people are obsessed with voting and if you don’t vote enough you’re not DAO enough. If you would’t like folks just buying a token to vote on the future of your democracy then why would you want this in your DAO?

A proposal is biased, it’s an advert written by the person raising funds to get funds towards their project. A quick read is clearly not enough to make an informed decision and no one has the time or resource to filter proposals unless its their JOB!

This is exactly why in democracies we elect full time representatives whose full time job is to filter through proposals and ideas to figure out the best path forward. Yes, this has its issues but its the best model we have working at massive scale.

“But… we have several other models of DAO voting”

Voting is a core part of a DAO as it’s the mechanism for collective decision making and there are several web3 companies providing infrastructure and tooling for decentralized voting.

I studied DAO voting in 2022

I spent 2022 researching 12 mature Impact DAOs, had conversations with 30+ builders and learnt a lot about DAO voting. I also attended many DAO events like MCON, DAOist, Schelling Point at Bogota and actively engaged in DAO conversations. In addition, I hosted a podcast on DAO voting, inviting DAO builders and governance researchers.

How voting works

DAOs use a variety of voting methods however a common decentralized governance voting process looks like this:

Community member raises a proposal.
The proposal is discussed on discourse and a consensus is reached if the proposal should be put up for vote.
If considered for vote the proposal is listed for off-chain voting on a decentralized voting platform, the most popular being snapshot.
Some DAOs take it to the next level to record the final vote on-chain (which involves gas fee and therefore expensive) which then triggers a smart contract that contains the code on how the funds needs to be distributed as per the outcome of on-chain voting.

The on-chain voting leading to automatic fund disbursement is the reason why some confuse DAOs to be auto governed organizations.

The Tally vote is the autonomous part of the Gitcoin DAO where if the vote on Tally passes then funds will flow from the Gitcoin DAO multisig to the work streams multisig autonomously. - Saf, full time contributor, Gitcoin

Delegate Voting

Delegate Voting (aka Liquid Democracy) is the most common voting style employed at DAOs.

Saf a full time contributor (employee) at Gitcoin DAO explains:

Delegate voting basically means that not every member of the community or every token holder has the time or the resources to participate actively in governance.
The governance tasks involve reading all the different kinds of governance proposals, being active in the governance forum and being very aware and on top of the matters.
What we do at Gitcoin is we delegate our tokens to someone in the community who is active and responsible and has expressed interest in participating actively in governance. We delegate our tokens to them. They are called stewards, designated as voting delegates.
We use steward health - kind of like report cards that basically gives you an overview of all the different kinds of stewards that we have.
If the person you've delegated tokens to isn't participating then you can un-delegate your tokens and delegate them to someone else. Also if they're not voting the way that you want them to, then you can delegate your tokens to someone else.

I asked Scott Moore co-founder of Gitcoin on Delegate Voting

DC: So who decides the delegates? They come across like the elected officials, the ones who make decisions on your behalf. What’s the process of electing them as they have so much responsibility in terms of deciding where the money should go. How do they get nominated?
Scott: So that's an entirely liquid democratic process. A steward will basically just apply on the forum to become a steward, to ask for community support and anyone can redirect at any time their votes to that person.
This is very common across DAOs, it's become kind of a standard post Uniswap with DAOs like ENS or Optimism as well, where the goal is really to ensure that anyone can kind of switch their vote at any time.

At the DAOist event at Bogota I asked a panel of voting experts on who came up with the idea of delegate voting in DAOs. Their response

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The problem with Delegate Voting:

Delegate voting seems like a workable approach but it runs into some of the same issues from the risk of delegates amassing power to low participation amongst token holders in vote delegation. Also DAOs do not seem to employ any strict selection and assessment process despite of delegates being trusted with immense voting power.

One Person One Vote

One person one vote is every DAO’s dream and is often called the “fairest of them all”, democratic way of governing. To be true to the value of decentralization most DAOs aspire for one person, one vote.

Proof Of Humanity (POH) employed one person one vote and had big issues with their DAO. Their ugly DAO battle played out on Twitter.

POH is a registry of unique non-repeatable humans built on the Ethereum blockchain. POH called themselves to be world’s most democratic DAO as every person authenticated on their protocol got one vote. And therefore anyone in their registry automatically became part of the DAO and had a vote on governance matters.

From the Impact DAOs Book, POH team decentralized governance played out as

Changes to the protocol can be proposed by anyone and are discussable by everyone. All registered users take a vote, and if there is a change or an update to the protocol, these are called ‘Humanity Improvement Proposals’.
The DAO uses a form of delegated voting style whereby registered users can transfer their vote to a representative to vote on their behalf.
Voting within the DAO has always been a contentious issue. The ‘one person, one vote’ model has led many to complain that most voters do not have enough knowledge or interest to vote optimally. They also suffered from low voting participation.

The problem with one person, one vote:

One person, one vote is a sybil resistance mechanism (as long as each address is authenticated) to ensure one unique person has one vote. However used for DAO governance it leads to everyone having to vote on every decision regardless of their expertise and knowhow of the subject matter. Even with delegate voting employed to reduce all token holder participation it may lead to not all token holders delegating their vote. Also POH suffered from low participation rate.

Problem with DAO voting

Voting fatigue when DAO members are required to deliberate and vote frequently. It leads to information overload and eventually members tuning out.
Lack of context and expertise resulting in poor decision making. Imagine marketing peeps deciding on engineering protocol decisions.
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Democracy leads to bureaucracy. More processes, more proposals, more time away from the purpose.
Token holders and contributors not engaged on day to day basis given the power to decide on critical matters. People without skin in the game voting on organizational matters is bound to result in poor decision making and frustration amongst the core team members who are operationally immersed and better informed to take decisions. Also voting would mean not valuing the knowledge of the core team that has probably thought deeper and harder about these issues than the general community.
Voting leads to polarization. The thread below has a video of Frederic Laloux author of the book, “Reinventing Organizations” talk about voting and how it leads to polarization.

@PoHDAO @santisiri Voting is a failure in and on itself and should be avoided at all costs. It polarizes. It creates a group of people that are not going to be happy moving forward. We should instead strive to unite and reach consent (not consensus). #sociocracy ","username":"xdamman","name":"Xavier Damman 🌍🌱🌻","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Jul 22 08:58:23 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"@fred_laloux: \"voting is a pretty terrible mechanism\"\n\"If every single decision gets up for vote, you start creating sort of camps, like the pro-Brexit and the anti Brexit, then suddenly it becomes part of your identity. And then it tears the company [community] in two\" https://t.co/rNy6WWG7x4","username":"all4climatedao","name":"All for Climate DAO 🌍🌱"},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":1,"like_count":4,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

I’ve had push back within our Impact DAO as well. DAO members thought that we were not voting enough and therefore not being a DAO enough. That came as a shock to me as we discussed every idea in Discord and used emojis as a show of support. The only missing part was writing proposals and voting on snapshot. To me that seemed highly bureaucratic taking focus away from the tasks at hand.

The obsession with decentralization and voting is so strong that DAOs often lose sight on “why” they exist.

@JessicaZartler me: let’s just get the work done and take a chill pill on voting ✌️","username":"deeparocks","name":"deepa 🏴‍☠️ 🤺👑 🌶 (Impact DAO Book+ Magazine)","profile_image_url":"","date":"Fri Sep 02 15:06:45 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":1,"like_count":0,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

How to Fix DAO Voting

My recommendation to DAOs would be to think from first principles to design a governance process that makes sense to the DAO and it’s mission.

To be efficient and results driven consider the following:

Don’t vote on every matter. Keep voting minimal.
Have a tiered voting system. Some matters exclusively for the core team to decide and others for the general community.

Identify decisions more fitting for the core team than opening it up to the entire community.

Vitalik Buterin suggests:

One way to categorize decisions that need to be made is to look at whether they are convex or concave. When decisions are convex, decentralizing the process of making that decision can easily lead to confusion and low-quality compromises. When decisions are concave, on the other hand, relying on the wisdom of the crowds can give better answers. In these cases, DAO-like structures with large amounts of diverse input going into decision-making can make a lot of sense.

More on convex and concave decisions on Vitalik’s blog, DAOs are not corporations.

Discussions greater than Votes. Open discussion threads in discord and discuss the matter till everyone reaches an understanding. Encourage debates as its critical to understanding everyone’s perspective and mitigates the risk of polarization.
Enable decentralization at pod level. Pods are small working groups organized around different tasks.

Vitalik Buterin details pod level decentralization taking Ukraine DAO as an example.

UkraineDAO, on the other hand, works by splitting its functions up into many pods, where each pod works as independently as possible. A top layer of governance can create new pods (in principle, governance can also fund pods, though so far funding has only gone to external Ukraine-related organizations), but once a pod is made and endowed with resources, it functions largely on its own. Internally, individual pods do have leaders and function in a more centralized way, though they still try to respect an ethos of personal autonomy.
Two things that can help ensure that an organization built this way will actually turn out to be meaningfully decentralized include:
A truly high level of autonomy for pods, where the pods accept resources from the core and are occasionally checked for alignment and competence if they want to keep getting those resources, but otherwise act entirely on their own and don't "take orders" from the core.
Highly decentralized and diverse core governance. This does not require a "governance token", but it does require broader and more diverse participation in the core. Normally, broad and diverse participation is a large tax on efficiency. But if (1) is satisfied, so pods are highly autonomous and the core needs to make fewer decisions, the effects of top-level governance being less efficient become smaller.

All for Climate DAO enables decentralization at project level. If enough DAO members are committed to an idea, All for Climate DAO helps them setup their own multisig, fundraise and let the project members govern.

Keep discussions and voting as much as possible at your DAO’s place of work which in most cases is Discord than on an external platform. Remember every time you go somewhere else to vote there will be a drop in participation.

Marcus Aurelius of Klima DAO (22K+ token holders) and Federico Ast of POH (17K+ members) who have both learnt hard lessons in large DAO governance suggests find a middle path, don’t vote often, identify decisions for community vote and do not decentralize at an early stage with one person one vote.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to reach out on Twitter or here on Substack.

🐇 Go Deep

Research paper on The Dissensus Protocol: Governing Differences in Online Peer Communities. A great paper that contrasts two DAOs with two widely different voting mechanisms and the learnings.

Recommended Podcasts

Klima DAO core team member Marcus Aurelius shares his views on voting after a year full of DAO chaos. He suggests not to vote too much, keep it minimal.

Fedrico Ast, POH and Kleros Founder recommends 👇

Do not decentralize at an early stage with one person one vote

All for Climate DAO Founders Leen and Xavier on governance and voting

Scott Moore, Co-founder Gitcoin talks liquid democracy and delegate nomination

Saf of Dream DAO and Gitcoin compares governance and voting at the two DAOs

🎉 Impact DAOs Book is Out

Deepa — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 17:24:22 GMT

Hi Folks 🙌

The Impact DAOs book we’ve been working on for the past five months is finally out. You can read the book online at https://impactdaos.xyz/

We wrote this book because we were curious and driven to learn about the new organizational model for doing good. I saw the potential of it with Ukraine DAO, which raised $7 million in 5 days, uncensored, and before that, with India’s Crypto Relief Fund, which managed a treasury of $1 Billion+ in donations on a blockchain wallet.

This book is the product of intensive research on 12 mature Impact DAOs through 1:1 conversations with 30 DAO builders. It presents the only source of truth on the emerging Impact DAO movement.

To deeply understand the new organization model, we ourselves formed a DAO, Impact DAO Media. As a DAO studying DAOs helped us gain first-hand lessons about establishing and growing a DAO. Living the “DAO life” also helped us ask pertinent questions to our interviewees about this process, from seeding to scaling and the challenges therein.

How to Read the Book

The website lists 8 sections as follows:

Why Impact DAO Book: It states our purpose of writing the book - who is this book for and why we wrote it.
What is a DAO? A Crash Course: The section details a clear definition on DAOs, how they differ from traditional organizations and the DAO landscape.
What is an Impact DAO: Defining Impact DAOs, advantages over nonprofits and why they are the future
Impact DAO Case Studies: We feature the 12 Impact DAOs that were part of our study. We showcase who they are, their impact and how they operate as a DAO.
Learnings & Analysis: Twenty three top learnings, insights and emerging patterns from our research.
Impact DAOs and the Future: We portray the future on how Impact DAOs are defining the future of work and organizing for good.
Giving Thanks: The Impact DAOs book is produced by a global team of collaborators on the internet. This section lists the contributors and the various production teams engaged in the bookmaking.
DAO and Web3 Glossary: Breakdown of key terms and concepts in DAOs and web3.

You can also listen to the conversation of Impact DAO builders interviewed for the book on impactdaos.xyz or on Spotify

What’s Next

The book is currently available online and is optimized for a great phone reading experience.
The PDF format of the book will be available soon on our website.
A physical copy of the book will be available in November 2023.
We plan to keep the online book continuously updated. For this, we are using Github for collaborative auto-updates to the book.
We are thinking books differently. We are inspired by Balaji of The Network State Book and his staggered approach to the book release, with online being the first. He also talks about why and how book publishing needs to evolve in a podcast with Lex Fridman 👇

@balajis on making books dynamic\n\n📕 constantly improve + update\n🌅 get something out there for feedback\n📲 treat book like an app\n👩‍💻 make it accessible \n🌍 optimize for📱+ android for wider reach\n\n impact dao book will be modelled on this 👆\n\nyoutu.be/VeH7qKZr0WI","username":"deeparocks","name":"deepa 🏴‍☠️ 🤺👑 🌶 (Impact DAO Book+ Magazine)","profile_image_url":"","date":"Mon Oct 24 14:38:17 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":7,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://youtu.be/VeH7qKZr0WI","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6efe939-4dcb-4576-b445-00dfa5a1ccc5_1280x720.jpeg","title":"Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA | Lex Fridman Podcast #331","description":"Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Co...","domain":"youtu.be"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

🙏 Thank you for taking this journey with me. I’m grateful for your support. And as always feel free to reach out on Twitter or here on Substack.

impactdaos.xyz","username":"deeparocks","name":"deepa 🏴‍☠️ 🤺👑 🌶 (Impact DAO Book+ Magazine)","profile_image_url":"","date":"Thu Nov 24 13:42:05 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":12,"like_count":60,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://impactdaos.xyz/","image":"https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a7b129df-d593-48b9-b1cf-501bef740879_2832x2832.jpeg","title":"Impact Dao Book","description":"The definitive guide to everything Impact DAO","domain":"impactdaos.xyz"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

🔥 Impact DAOs > Nonprofits

Deepa — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 16:44:39 GMT

DAOs are less of a crypto thing and more of a web3 thing.I think web3 has so much potential in solving nonprofit inefficiencies - Kimbal Musk, Big Green DAO

Nonprofits: The Status Quo

Public trust is the currency of the nonprofit sector. And unfortunately, trust in nonprofits is failing. Only 56% of Americans trust nonprofits, according to 2022 research conducted by Edelman Data and Intelligence in partnership with Independent Sector.

Simply put, the standard nonprofit model is no longer adequate to meet the needs of the present day.

The world is facing unprecedented challenges that require radical new thinking and fundamental change. For example, income inequality is at an all-time high, the climate crisis is accelerating, and the reputation of key institutions (such as banking, law, and government) is at an all-time low.

Today’s nonprofit system is 120 years old, and has simply failed to evolve. The era of hyper-connectivity ushered in by the internet has radically transformed the way we live and work. Nonprofits are still stuck in the past.

Chief among the sector’s problems is rampant inefficiency. Some of the systemic problems include:

High fundraising and operating costs.
Risk-aversion and talent constraints due to a mindset of appeasing donors.
Centralized grantmaking, with the board of directors and executive team allocating funds without input from subject matter experts.
Slow pace of delivery owing to bureaucracy and red tape.
Lack of transparency and accountability makes it hard to track where the money goes and how it is being used.
Abuse of power (e.g. biased decision-making owing to personal connections).
Global NGOs trying to solve local issues without understanding the local context.
Meta nonprofit structures extract value from every donation that passes through them for local projects. On an average nonprofits charge 15% cut every time they act as a passthrough.
Lack of collaboration among nonprofits as they compete for limited donor funds.
Reliance on donations and government funding, which can be unpredictable and unreliable.

The nonprofit sector is stagnant. Top nonprofits are over 100 years old. Few founders enter the arena. Those that do are actively discouraged. And competing with the incumbents is nearly impossible - Nate Van Cleve, Tech Impact Entrepreneur

Enter Impact DAOs

Web3 and the DAO model offer solutions to many of these problems. Above all, they provide a blank canvas for experimentation and reimagining new ways of doing things.

Web3 tools and technology, coupled with first-principles thinking, offer a powerful new way to address problems at a scale.

Our study of thirty Impact DAO builders reveals exciting new ways in which DAOs are innovating. Some of the DAO model’s advantages include:

As an internet-based organization, it is borderless and open. Anyone from anywhere can participate.
Fast and permissionless to set up.
Mission-first orientation - infrastructure can come later.
Access to global talent and expertise.
Decentralized power and decision-making.
Built-in incentives for mission-aligned actions. The community decides on the activities and rewards people for actions that create value.
Tokenomics to fund operations and impact without reliance on donors.
Peer-to-peer transactions eliminate intermediaries (and associated fees).
Radical transparency with the use of blockchain, every transaction is accounted for and publicly viewable.
Ability to engage donors, volunteers and other stakeholders through DAO governance processes.
Internet-level scale and speed.
Efficiency thanks to automation through smart contracts.
Fast, easy and low-cost crypto fundraising.
Censorship resistant.

Use cases of Impact DAOs and Web3 tech

Impact Market, the world’s largest UBI program focusing on recipients in the world's poorest, least accessible areas (war zones, refugee camps), uses web3 technology to deliver UBI directly to those in need. They have carried out successful operations in 37 countries in the last two years alone.
Impact Market is the web3 version of GiveDirectly and are partnering with UN WFP on UBI as decentralized protocol provides reach impossible with human aided UBI delivery.

Kimbal Musk's Big Green DAO is disrupting the grantmaking process. The US nonprofit Big Green decentralized its own grantmaking function in Sept 2021, and has recently completed its first year as a full DAO. They have benefited from efficiency improvement thanks to automation, cross nonprofit collaboration, and the ability to leverage grassroots expertise.

India Crypto COVID Relief, a crypto fundraising campaign that began its life on Twitter. After gaining viral status, the group raised over a billion dollars during May 2021, at the height of India's COVID crisis. The campaign was completely volunteer-run, powered by a global community collaborating on Discord. Armed with crypto and blockchain technology, the relief fund operated on a completely transparent basis, with every transaction publicly viewable on the blockchain.
Crypto Good
Crypto Fundraising for India's COVID Relief
This fundraising campaign piqued my interest in crypto and how it can make real impact. The campaign was initiated, promoted and backed by folks from the crypto community including the likes of Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum and Balaji, former CTO of Coinbase. The campaign spread like wildfire and has generated over USD 1 billion so far…
Read more
5 years ago · Deepa

Gitcoin, the largest crowdfunding platform for open-source web3 projects, operates as a DAO structure. It holds grant rounds every quarter according to the quadratic funding model. The creation of our upcoming ImpactDAO book was possible in large part thanks to receiving two QF Gitcoin grants as part of this process.

Pact DAO is facilitating hyper-local mutual aid in New York City. They are achieving this primarily by equipping neighborhood organizations with web3 collaboration tools and quick-setup multisig wallets for transparent fund management.

All for Climate is building a global movement of climate activists to enable change at a local level. Unlike traditional organizations such as Greenpeace, however, All for Climate DAO operates publicly on Discord, and anyone can join. They provide training and crypto fundraising support to incubate decentralized climate initiatives (e.g. Regen Unite), each with its own multi-sig.

Crypto Good

🌱All for Climate DAO Founders on Building a Web3 Climate Movement

All for Climate DAO's vision is to be the Greenpeace of the 21st century. Their goal is to build a sustainable decentralized climate movement using web3 tools and ethos. The DAO empowers climate activists with shared infrastructure, connections, and orientation to web3 ways of doing things. The big idea is to enable climate solutions that are rooted loc…

3 years ago · 5 likes · Deepa

Impact DAOs > Nonprofits

Impact DAOs offer a radically new way of organizing, fundraising and allocating resources for causes. They are a new operating framework for our digital lives.

Powered by web3 technology (i.e. blockchain), smart contracts and decentralized apps, DAOs can achieve scale, impact and efficiency that is not possible with the prevailing, traditional nonprofit model. Many have already demonstrated large-scale reach.

Our upcoming Impact DAO book profiles 12 exemplary Impact DAOs and gives a breakdown of everything you need to know to build in web3 for a better world ❤️

The Impact DAO book coming this month here.

🐇 Dig Deeper

📺 The Nonprofit problem 👇

🎧 Listen to Impact DAO Builders on how they are solving for large scale societal problems.

Crypto Good

🎧DAO 101 Playlist

About 5months ago, we (Impact DAO Media) set out to study the Impact DAOs. Our goal was to research this new organization type thoroughly and to publish our learnings in a book. 🎉Good news, the intensive DAO research is complete, and the Impact DAO book is coming out…

3 years ago · 3 likes · Deepa

Crypto Good

🌻What are Impact DAOs?

DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a new type of internet-first organization that exists only because technology can now allow anyone to collaborate seamlessly. Impact DAOs are DAOs focused on making a positive impact on people and the planet. Think of them as internet-native nonprofits and social impact organizations…

3 years ago · 4 likes · Deepa

If you have any comments, ideas or simply want to say 👋 connect on Twitter or here on Substack

To the future ✌️

🎧DAO 101 Playlist

Deepa — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 14:50:39 GMT

About 5months ago, we (Impact DAO Media) set out to study the Impact DAOs. Our goal was to research this new organization type thoroughly and to publish our learnings in a book.

🎉Good news, the intensive DAO research is complete, and the Impact DAO book is coming out this month.

For this study we spoke to 30 DAO builders (founders and contributors) across 12 DAOs.

The DAO builder interviews are now available as a podcast.

🔔 Subscribe to our podcast on Spotify and Google Podcasts.

All about Impact DAOs, breaking down every concept and an inside look into the DAOverse.

📱DeFi for the Underbanked + GoodDollar DAO with Co-founder Anna Stone #1

❤️Crypto Improving Lives + Building of Human DAO with Founder Christopher Chase #2

🌳Blockchain for Regeneration, Gregory Landua on Founding Regen Network #3

🐬How DAOs Operate, An Inside Look with Multi-DAO Contributor Saf #4

🪙GoodDollar DAO Deep Dive with Jessica Salama #5

✊Political Ideologies and DAOs with Peth Founder MetaFam and DAO Ideologies Expert #6

💰How Gitcoin DAO Works with Ben West, Cause Round Lead at Gitcoin #7

🌆Building NYC Pact DAO with Founder Marisa Rando #8

🌏Crypto for Next Billion with Marco, Founder Impact Market #9

🇦🇺Adam on Human DAO Tokenomics, Web3 Gig Economy and DAO Work #10

🙋‍♀️Growing with Human DAO Interview with Kyla from the Philippines #11

🌲Klima DAO Explained with Core Contributor Marcus Aurelius #12

🌟The Gitcoin Story with Scott Moore, Cofounder Gitcoin #13

🎙Listen to Deepa and Justin of Impact DAO Media talk about DAOs as inevitable, Impact DAO research findings and how to talk about crypto with non believers 😝

For questions and ideas reach out to me on Twitter. Thank you for listening. gm ☀️

✊The DAO Contributor

Deepa — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 13:44:14 GMT

I spoke to Alfredo, core contributor at Pact DAO on what it’s like to work in a DAO. Pact DAO is an NYC based DAO focused on building hyper local mutual aid and supporting community led initiatives. We previously interviewed the Founder Marisa Rando on founding Pact DAO.

This interview is part of the Impact DAO Research Study

D: How did you learn about Pact DAO?

A: At some point last year, I went down the rabbit hole of leftist crypto Twitter. I found The Blockchain Socialist, and once I saw The Blockchain Socialist, I was like, wow. He's like a podcaster, and an all-around kind of internet personality, for lack of a better word, a brand or something. He has a pseudonym, The Blockchain Socialist. So I was like, 'Oh, I've found this kind of little corner of the internet that is aligned with using crypto protocols for socialist causes.' And then I started following particular things. Then eventually, through one of these rabbit holes, I found a news story about Pact DAO and its crowdfunding campaign.

I noticed that Pact DAO was based in New York. I was like, 'Oh my God, this is a perfect opportunity.' One of the things that has always prevented me from getting involved in crypto or NFTs or all that stuff was the fact that I value in-person collaboration and in-person meetings.

The fact that this was local and I could talk to people and confirm that they were real people was a massive moment for me.

@PaperboyPrince Love Gallery!\n\nCome grab ready made meals, fresh produce, and canned goods 🥒\n\ntag local organizations/folks below that can spread the word 🙏 #mutualaid #nyc ","username":"pactDAO","name":"pact","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Jun 22 15:18:53 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/w_1028,c_limit,q_auto:best/l_twitter_play_button_rvaygk,w_88/yr6hmimg9x4hjorcal1h","link_url":"https://t.co/bp66RITv64","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":17,"like_count":38,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1539628902762561536/pu/vid/320x568/idQwgMIE1fViebFq.mp4?tag=12","belowTheFold":false}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

D: Which year was it when you got to know about Pact?

A: I don't remember which month. I remember it was probably like late last year (2021)

D: Then you reached out to the core team. Are you part of the core team?

A: Yes.

D: So you met with Marisa, Founder of Pact DAO, and then what was next? Can you explain how you got associated with them?

Also, how does work get done in the organization, and what is your role?

A: Yeah, definitely not structured. As we're talking now, we're figuring out more structure. So how I got started was basically I went to Pact Dao's crowdfunding page, and I contributed to the campaign. This is the first crypto campaign thing that I actually contributed to.

Then I went into their Discord, and so they have a section where if you want to be more involved with the campaign, you fill out a questionnaire, like what would you like to help with, and stuff like that. So I submitted that, and then Marisa reached out, and we had a video chat. We just talked a couple of times about our priorities, how we could help, etc.

So out of that, she figured out I would be a good fit, and now we have weekly meetings on Monday, and we go through some priorities. The thing that I'm responsible for now is event organizing. We're organizing about 5-6 events this summer, all based around socialist causes like labor or abolitionist movements, food insecurity, and mutual aid.

Another thing that we do is, and this is not necessarily my role, planning out Pact DAO's future.

We just did a soft launch of our season one campaign, structuring how we're prioritizing mutual aid and organizing mutual aid around crypto and dual power. And how we to best leverage our assets and knowledge.

D: What do you think is the future of Pact DAO? What impact do you wanna make in New York City? Who are the people you wanna serve?

I feel like Pact DAO's model will be adopted by lots of cities, and that's why we are so interested in learning about you. It'll be easy for other cities to set up their DAOs once they know about your model.

A: Yeah, that's very encouraging to hear that. I hope to accelerate local organizations that either don't have enough funds or don't have enough people on the ground to be doing the things that they know work. Things like mutual aid, like that's the core thing that we do. Letting these community groups have consistent access to funds through crypto where they can withdraw or mobilize people they need through other organizations; that cross-channel collaboration.

We're also experimenting with a few pilot programs in the neighborhood, like Abolitionist organizations. Where we can either pay people to watch cops or organize movements that don't have surveillance attached to them.

So whether that's organizing a protest on social media or speeding up the criminal justice process through bail funds and paying access to lawyer fees. Things we know work, but specifically in a local organization that doesn't have the funds or the access that a larger nonprofit would.

I sincerely believe that the real work is being done by these local organizations. These neighborhood-based organizations know their community, what works, and what they need. So we are just an intermediary to get them what they need.

D: How important is fundraising for Pact DAO since mutual aid involves giving out funds.

A: We fundraise through our crowdfunding campaign on Mirror. Also, through grants. One of the programs we will be piloting is a rent relief pilot. So definitely, fundraising is a significant aspect.

Also for now we're sitting on a pile of crypto money that we wanna distribute. So the question is how can we most equitably distribute those funds.

D: What are your thoughts on fund distribution? Is it going to be need-based? How would you decide? Would you have a more participatory crypto-style approach to fund disbursement?

A: We're still figuring that out because we realize that we can't do everything, so that's why we have these pilot programs to see what resonates and how we're best able to help. So we're still very much figuring that out.

D: The aid money will be in crypto. Are you helping those community organizations set up with crypto wallets? Also, how are you empowering your community to stay safe with crypto?

A: Yeah, the very first event we had was educating the mutual aid world on ways to use crypto. So, education is a big part of what we realize we need to do.

We're building a resource portal that will live on our website on how to onboard to crypto and protect yourself.

So one of our core team members is tasked with building that resource portal. We are also working with another organization that deals exclusively with education in crypto. We're going to collaborate with them on an event, getting both of our people together, our communities together. So absolutely, education is a massive part of what we need to do.

D: I feel like hands-on education is the best. I've seen the Bitcoin community provide hands-on training to activists that live under authoritarian regimes. For example, helping them set up a crypto wallet, etc. So is hands-on education a focus for you?

A: Yes, I feel like one of the stumbling blocks is, I think that one of the biggest problems here is the kind of hesitation with crypto within the leftist circles that we are part of.

It's fascinating how there's that dichotomy between people who see crypto as an opportunity to free themselves from these authoritarian governments. And those in more or less democratically controlled governments that don't like the financialization of crypto and all of that.

So that's one of the reasons we are building very slowly and deliberately. And why we're doing a lot of community events and not forcing anyone to adopt crypto, or you have to have such and such a wallet to work with us, etc.

One of the things that we're building out is making it possible for people who don't want to be involved with crypto to have the option to withdraw funds in USD.

A chance to participate as little as possible within the crypto environment but can still get the benefits of being part of our collective.

We're making both happen, which I think in New York is what needs to happen because we don't want to force anyone to do anything they don't want to.

D: I've been documenting crypto's social good use cases for over a year. When I talk to mainstream media about the good happening in crypto, they are like, 'Hey, it's all hopes and dreams, and there's nothing really there. And I'm like, 'listen, these are the use cases; go read them.'

We are writing a book demonstrating the use cases of crypto for good. Pact DAO will be one of 12 DAOs listed as case studies in that book.

I feel one way to break that narrative is by highlighting the good. Because the bad narrative is so strong right now that people don't see past it.

Maybe as part of your resource center, positive use cases could be one of them, right?

A: Absolutely. It says a lot that we're continuing to build with almost more enthusiasm and momentum now that crypto is in the bear market.

I'm actually very happy that crypto is in a 'bear market' because of the people who are in it, and the people who are building are not after a return on investment. They're building the real solutions that need to be built.

D: How many people are there in your Discord? And how many of them are active?

A: So there are about 70 people who are in our Discord community. Nearly half of them, I would say, is active. And then in our core team, it's about 10. Although of that core team, of that 10, I think about 5-6 are active.

D: What have some of your learnings been?

A: What I have learned is that if you meet people where they are, like if you go to a community organization that is dealing with food insecurity or wants to accelerate abolition efforts, once they know that you are aligned with them on those goals, they will be more open to having the conversation on incorporating crypto into their game plan.

But if you speak first with, 'Hey, we're a crypto organization, or we're using crypto for this, and then you say, 'Oh, we can't partner with you on that - that approach is not gonna work.

You have to meet people where they are and be part of their community. You can't be an outsider. You have to be a neighbor.

You have to have that trust. And it really gives me optimism that there will be more positive use cases of crypto. As you said at the beginning of this conversation, there will be more and more of these use cases because I think it's inevitable.

It's just about making people aware of how this can be used and educating them. So it has made me a little more optimistic, which is one reason why I am still involved.

D: DAOs are such a different way of working. What advice do you have for people who wanna join? Do they need to have a different kind of mindset?

A: Yeah, I feel it's a different way of working. At least from all the conversations I've had, people understand that everyone has a different capacity in terms of how much work they can handle. And we work very asynchronously. So my advice is to the people looking at it -

Don't be intimidated by the fact that it might be new. If you can only contribute like 20 minutes a day, it's okay; your team will value that. Whether you want to contribute part-time or full-time, it's your capacity. So don't be turned off by thinking that it's gonna be a full-time job.
The other thing would be some advice for people getting started. Don't be intimidated by the things you don't know because everybody is learning this simultaneously.

As I said, this was my first DAO experience, and I'm learning along the way, and there are people alongside me that are learning. So that's such an encouraging environment to know that you're learning together.

The fact that DAOs are organized mainly virtually, I think, makes it a lot less intimidating because you can ask dumb questions that I think people wouldn't ask in person.

The biggest hesitation people have, other than time is education. Learning in that Discord is probably the biggest asset that people have, having those people around. You can directly message someone if you feel connected to one person more. So just don't be intimidated by the fact that I might not know something because the reality is no one knows everything.

D: That's so true, thank you for sharing your story; we are glad to have you as part of our study 🔸

🎙 Alfredo was interviewed on August 5th, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project.

This post is part of a series on the Impact DAOs Research + Book project. This project is by Impact DAO Media, a collective of folks in web3 + impact + media. The team members on Twitter are @tranimal, @katerinabohlec, @Abeers123, @Poplinecreation, @crystaldstreet, @0xSardius, @karanth_harsha, @actThreeCC, @0xSiddhearta, @Value_Strat, @zaldarren, @astrocruz_s, @ashisharora27, @pop_timism, @alkohlmist, @ikonoklast, @bjuglas, @BlockchangeSol1, @sandeepdas9179, @happyplace888 + Kim on LI

⁉️ If you have any questions or ideas reach out to us on Twitter

🎉We have a Podcast, you can now listen to all about impact daos here

From the Classroom to the Cryptosphere: One Student's Journey

Deepa — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 13:42:22 GMT

Joshua Cruz, 19 yo Dream DAO Fellow

I interviewed Joshua, a 19-year-old college student from Mexico, a Dream DAO founding contributor, and a fellow.

Dream DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that trains and funds Gen-Z leaders on doing good with crypto. Dream DAO came out of Civics Unplugged, a US-registered 501c3 nonprofit.

D: How did you learn about Dream DAO, and how long have you been with the organization?

J: I found out about Dream DAO from Civics Unplugged. Dream DAO was co-founded by people from Civics Unplugged. I was a Fall 2021 fellow at CU , and when I graduated from the Fellowship, they invited me to join and explore web3. That's how I joined Dream DAO in late November 2021, and I have been with them since then.

D: So, you are like a Founding Member?

J: Yes. Gary, the founder of Civics Unplugged, told the whole community about Dream DAO; around 80 people were interested in exploring this new universe. 40 members from the Civics Unplugged alumni became part of Dream DAO.

D: How many builders were there, or the Fellows who became part of Dream DAO?

J: I think between 40-45.

D: So around 40-45 builders. Does each get a mentor like one-to-one mentoring? What is the ratio?

J: There are around 30 to 40 mentors known as champions at Dream DAO. We use a tool called Intros AI. Each week we have an intro with a champion, where you start discussing, clarify your doubts or talk about what you are exploring and how you are figuring out how to contribute to a web3 organization.

D:Who are the champions you work closely with?

J: In Dream DAO, we have working groups and each working group is a part of the overall structure of the DAO. We have builders and champions working as co-leaders for various working groups. In my working group, which is Gatherings in which I am also the WG Lead, I have worked closely with Saf, a champion at Dream DAO.

D: How many working groups are there at Dream DAO?

J: During this season 1, we have five working groups - DAO Learning, Community Building, Governance, Partnerships and Meta.

D: How has your experience been so far? Like you have been part of Civics Unplugged, you are now part of Dream DAO. Is it radically different or the same? How would you describe being at both organizations and also in terms of your personal growth and learning?

J: In terms of learning, it is different.

For example, Civics Unplugged is a 3-month program. You attend the 3-month program, graduate from the Fellowship if you fulfill the requirements, and become a part of the alumni. You can be a part of the community looking for opportunities and even apply to be in the next cohort.

The part with Dream DAO is that you are learning all day.

For example, we have Learning Sessions twice a week. If the learning session this week is going to be about making a career in web3, then a guest speaker will teach you, give you advice around the gaps that exist in your skill sets, and skills to build for an internship or research.

We are learning the whole time and not just for three months. For example, I am a founding builder, so I started in November and am still learning.

In Civics Unplugged, there are opportunities when you are in the fellowship program and when you are alumni. But in Dream DAO, there are more opportunities because Dream DAO and web3 are much more diverse. For example, in the Explorers Program, you can be matched with an internship host site, work for two months over the summer, and get paid for it. You are learning and contributing to web3.

In terms of learning and growth, it has helped me a lot, from learning about web3 tools to understanding how cryptocurrencies and wallets work.

As a person, you want to contribute to a better future for humanity. Dream DAO has the same objectives as Civics Unplugged but in web3.

I have learned about new tools, and right now, I'm an intern at dOrg. The people at dOrg are amazing, and they have taught me many things, including the projects they are working on for different web3 companies.

Also I have learned more about social impact and the impact we can generate and build with web3 technology.

D: And how would you be compensated for this internship? Through their token, in cryptocurrency or in fiat currency?

J: In terms of working at dOrg, I am being paid in stablecoins. In Dream DAO I’m getting paid per hour for the two recurring roles I have. We get paid in USDC.

D: Just so I understand correctly, you get compensated when you are part of a working group.

J: Yes, a working group coordinator gets paid, and there are bounties for all contributors in the Working Group in different tasks.. If you achieve that task, you get a bonus for it. So compensation is available, but it depends on whether you are working, you are eager to learn, and if you are integrated.

In Dream DAO we have a philosophy that you are not here to just get paid and go home but to gain experience, to learn and to start a career in web3.

Dream DAO has introduced this to us, wherein all the builders who made significant contributions in Phase 1, will get stipends.

D: That's right. At this age, the attitude should be towards learning and enriching yourself with skills because that's invaluable. It's great though that you can get both at Dream DAO.

I understand a new NFT mint is going on right now, and there will be a new season with new champions and builders. So, what will happen to the builders of the first season?

J: They have the option to stay. There are some requirements if you want to renew your membership from season one to two. For example, attend some events and make a retrospective form. If you want to participate in season two, the builders and champions can renew their membership.

D: Is the application process public? Where is the application process?

J: Yes, the application is public. For builders, you need to be between 15-20 years of age, and anyone from all over the world can apply. But Dream DAO gives preference to Civics Unplugged alums. You can still apply even if you are not alumni. For champions, you need to mint a Skywalk Z. You first need to mint an NFT to become a part of the Dream DAO community. Then you need to apply to become a champion.

D: I understand with Season 2 that new builders (fellows) will come in, and the old ones will continue. So, the cohort becomes bigger, right, like up to 80?

So do you think, as an older cohort, you have more responsibilities in mentoring the newer ones coming or would you work alongside them?

What would your role be if you renew and continue to stay in Dream DAO as a builder?

J: From season one, cohort 1 has some experience, but many builders have little. This is why Dream DAO exists to invest in and train Gen Z to discover web3. So, these people will not be experts in web3 systems, DAOs, cryptocurrency, wallets etc.

The responsibility of the Community Builder Coordinator Working Group is to find out what the community needs (for example, more learning sessions, more articles, more resources), look into the gaps, and figure out with other working groups on how these gaps can be filled. This is important because if you lose interest, you are going to drop out quickly.

D: From what I hear, I think Dream DAO is an excellent organization providing young people with hands-on learning.

How much of your time goes to Dream DAO? Like I am sure you must be attending school or college alongside. What is your time commitment to Dream DAO?

J: When applying or renewing your membership, there is a space where you can say, "I am free 1-5 hours per week, 5-10 hours, or more than 10 hours". It depends on you and your needs. I remember when I filled out the form in Season 1 to become a founding builder, I just wrote 5 hours a week because I had school.

Then I got involved in web3 via Dream DAO and started getting more involved. Right now, I am contributing 10 hours per week to Dream DAO. For example, Learning Together sessions last an hour, and we have two of these each week, so that's two hours. Then, an hour more for creating and distributing POAPs and additional hours for the Explorers Program to sync with champions and builders in Twitter spaces and real-life events.

D: Now that you have spent so much time in web3, and I know it is too early to ask, but do you think you will make a career in web3?

J: I would say yes. As I have already mentioned, I am an intern in dOrg, and my role involves administration and marketing. For example, one of my tasks was to find all the builders working in dOrg and their projects.

There are so many projects, one from Tezos, one from Polywrap, and one from NEAR, and when I am reading these projects, I feel excited and want to learn more.

In college, I am going to study both Actuarial Science and Data Science. We had a learning session about starting a career in web3, and most of the Gen Z folks were like 18-20 years old.

Most people, when they start in web3, do administration work because they don’t know how to build an app, how to make a project using HTML, or know R.

If you want to get involved in web3, you need to learn these things from zero.

So, most of the builders in Dream DAO are just part of operations, like for example governance, designing proposals, and designing how the system is going to function.

Before I noticed that Snapshot existed, I saw that there was this tool where people could vote on anything. These are the kind of things that I have learnt in the operations team, which has helped me a lot.

D: How do kids learn about Dream DAO, because I feel it is gaining a separate identity from Civics Unplugged? So not everybody will come from Civics Unplugged. They might apply directly to Dream DAO and then learn about Civics Unplugged.

J: Yes, because people from all over the world can apply. Dream DAO also has a lot of backgrounds from a lot of countries. I have met people from Brazil, Mexico, the United States, India, Singapore, Russia, and the UK.

Having a lot of backgrounds help us connect with other cultures and understand how things have different meanings for different people.

And having people, not from Civics Unplugged is good because we can introduce them to the community. If they have the age eligibility, they can apply and enhance their leadership skills and expand their opportunities and network.

D: I am super impressed with the organization. It has been well thought through from the start. How many people were involved in the initial design process?

J: I’m not sure about the exact number of people. I know that when I entered as a founding builder, many champions were selected because Gary and Madison are from the US and made a lot of connections to get feedback on the DAO. They received a lot of feedback from a lot of champions. And also from leaders from other web3 organizations like Celo, Regen Network and dorg etc.

When I entered Dream DAO, all the people were new except Gary and Madison and some champions they had met before. I know there is only one person who makes the NFTs, and I don't know if there are more designers. Currently, there are 42-45 builders, and 40 champions, which include Gary and Madison and the other co-founders who are building the DAO.

D: Okay, that's very nice. I have covered most of the questions, but I wanted to ask you about the tools used in operations. What tools do you use for collaborating and getting work done? What is the tech stack?

J: To communicate day-to-day, we use Discord messaging, even though we have a Telegram group. For all documentation, we use Notion, but we have tried Clarity and Murmur. We use Snapshot and Slack, and Utopia for payments.

D: And the NFT that you have right now represents your membership. In a scenario where you don’t want to be a member next season, what would you do with the NFT?

J: You can keep the NFT because it cannot be burned but you will not be able to participate in governance decisions and as a voting member.

Thank you Joshua. You are a true ambassador of Dream DAO. And it's been fantastic to hear your perspective on DAOs and web3 🔶

🎙 Joshua was interviewed on June 22nd 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project. He’s also our intern at Impact DAOs and attending first year of college studying Actuarial Science in Mexico 🇲🇽

Joshua with his fellow Dream DAO crew of Devcon Bogota, October, 2022

🙏 Big thanks to ReFi Podcast for their gift of $2500 cUSD to support the launch of our upcoming Impact DAO book.

@ImpactDAOMedia\n\nWe want to support a community of content creators to tell the story of regeneration! Other than being big fans of the @ImpactDAOMedia team, we can inspire entrepreneurs to build communities that leverage the power of #web3 to solve global challenges","username":"ReFiPodcast","name":"ReFi Podcast","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Oct 19 20:05:14 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":2,"like_count":7,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

🌻What are Impact DAOs?

Deepa — Fri, 21 Oct 2022 12:25:31 GMT

DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a new type of internet-first organization that exists only because technology can now allow anyone to collaborate seamlessly.

Impact DAOs are DAOs focused on making a positive impact on people and the planet. Think of them as internet-native nonprofits and social impact organizations.

Web3 tools like blockchains, smart contracts, decentralized apps (Dapps) along with group video and chat platforms have enabled transparency amongst strangers and collective decision-making. And DAOs are built on top of these very tools.

DNA of an Impact DAO

Impact DAOs operate on the principles of decentralized power, collective decision-making, and transparency.

Key characteristics of Impact DAOs are

Internet native communities
Distributed teams
Decentralized governance
Sovereign individuals and entities
Transparent

Other features of organizing as a DAO

No bosses; everyone is a leader
Co-creation and co-ownership are at the heart of it
Flat, concentric structure vs. top-down, hierarchical system
Decentralized decision-making vs. centralized
Financial sustainability via tokens
Transparent operations and transactions
No physical office; organized online on a dedicated platform
Organized around work streams and pods
Contributors instead of employees
Self-driven, permission-less, entrepreneurial mindset

DAO spelled out

D: Distributed teams + decentralized governance

A: Autonomous as in sovereign entities + individuals

O: Online organized group with a common purpose

How do Impact DAOs start and an MVP

An initiator(s) floats the idea for an Impact DAO on the internet. Twitter is the platform of choice (hence the term “crypto twitter”) since everyone who is in crypto is on Twitter.

People galvanize around the idea. As a first step, they either start a Telegram chat or set up a Discord server to collaborate. The group defines its mission and values and gets started with identifying its activities.

They have at least one full-time contributor who drives the work forward. They could also be all part-time contributors with a couple of people taking the lead in moving the mission forward.

A digital wallet on the blockchain, aka multi-sig wallet, is set up for fund management. The multi-sig wallet is akin to a bank account with multiple signatories. This is a crucial part of the DAO to help build operational trust amongst strangers.

The Impact DAO Wave is Inevitable

Brief History

Impact DAO ecosystem is nascent but fast-growing. The first Impact DAO can be traced back to June 2020 with Elimu.ai setting up as a DAO.

Elimu.ai is an open-source project on Github developing AI-powered learning apps for kids in need and the first one to become a DAO.

Because the purpose of the elimu.ai Community (providing every child with access to quality basic education) transcends geography or political borders, it makes perfect sense for us to be a DAO to organize ourselves. - Nya, Founder Elimu.ai

Mid 2021 is when the next wave of Impact DAOs came around - Gitcoin DAO, Human DAO, Pact DAO, Big Green DAO, Dream DAO are some of the ones launched during this period.

2022 has been the year of DAO explosion, with an estimated 500 DAOs that started out this year. We believe many social impact organizations will launch as DAO first in the future. And the ones that are not DAOs will transition into one.

DAO Transition

There are many instances of nonprofits that have transitioned into a DAO model. They begin by decentralizing slowly, one function at a time.

1. Kimbal Musk's Big Green, a US 501c3 nonprofit founded in 2011, launched Big Green DAO in November 2021 to democratize grant-making. The DAO is controlled by frontline food activists, grantees and donors

2. Civics Unplugged, a US 501c3 nonprofit founded in 2019, ventured into web3 by starting Dream DAO. The DAO is the subset of the nonprofit aimed at onboarding high schoolers into web3

3. Pact DAO, a US 501c3 nonprofit founded in 2020 to provide mutual support in NYC, completely transitioned into a DAO in 2021. Pact DAO has gone a step further to be the first to amend their bylaws to be DAO friendly

4. Gitcoin, a web3 crowdfunding platform that started out as a traditional tech company in 2017, transitioned into a DAO in May 2021.

DAO Advantages

The DAO way of doing things has many advantages for social good practitioners. The web3 ethos and technology provide higher moral ground and the ability to scale coordination and impact.

Ukraine DAO started three days before Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. They raised 8 million dollars in 5 days. The DAO used a blockchain multi-sig wallet for receiving, storing, and managing funds, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) to fundraise, Telegram and Discord to collaborate, and Twitter and Twitter Spaces to communicate.

They had contributors from all over the world. The blockchain provided transparency, with every single transaction viewable and immutable. Ukraine DAO remained uncensored while Patreon suspended the Ukraine nonprofit Come Back Alive from its fundraising platform.

Crypto Good

Deep Dive Into Ukraine DAO - A Model for Future Nonprofits

UkraineDAO is a decentralized software powered organization that came into being shortly after Russia attacked Ukraine. Their purpose is to raise funds for Ukrainians using web3 tech. In 5 days UkraineDAO raised $7M in crypto donations from 3000+ people on the internet. In fact Ukraine DAO is an organization that exi…

4 years ago · Deepa

DAOs and web3 provide a new model of organizing that’s humane and inclusive. The model is best suited for our current internet-governed lives. It's easier to meet and collaborate with people on the internet than in real life. Besides, one gets to work with people from anywhere and everywhere. This kind of global collaboration helps bring diverse perspectives to problem-solving. In the end, it builds a kind world that learns to work together despite differences.

Some of the Key DAO Advantages

They are borderless and open. Anyone from anywhere can participate.
Fast, permissionless set-up
Transparent organizations operating in public
Access to global expertise
Collective ownership and decision-making
Built-in incentive for aligned actions. The community decides on the activities and rewards people for actions that create value.
Tokenomics to fund operations and impact without reliance on donors
Peer to peer transactions eliminates middlemen
Radical transparency with the use of blockchain, every transaction is accounted for and viewable publicly
Engaged Donors, volunteers and other stakeholders through DAO governance
Internet-level scale and speed
Fast, easy and low cost crypto fundraising
Censorship resistant

@kimbal’s DAO is one I’m watching & taking notes on. 🧐 📝 ","username":"Jason","name":"jason@calacanis.com","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sun Oct 23 21:11:19 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"Honored to know these inspiring leaders who are reimagining philanthropy w/ @BigGreen DAO to bring equity, inclusion, and empowerment to grassroots organizations growing food across America.\n\nGive them a follow: @verodsmile @mcdonald_ssg @scorpiowande @adae_Rbriones @cefleming14 https://t.co/zNTmbyIY2i","username":"kimbal","name":"𝙺𝚒𝚖𝚋𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚔 🤠"},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":1,"like_count":49,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

Bullish on Impact DAOs

Impact DAOs are the future of building the better world we know is possible. In the future, DAOs will become the most natural way to organize for causes big and small.

Just like the open-source code of the early internet gave rise to a new way of organizing and doing business, the core primitives of web3 will change how we work together to facilitate solving our most pressing problems. These developments will allow Impact DAOs to become a mainstream medium for building a better world.

Onwards 🚀✌️

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter.

Special thanks to the Impact DAO community members that came together on Twitter Spaces to help define Impact DAOs.

🐬Dive Deeper into Impact DAOs

Crypto Good

🌱All for Climate DAO Founders on Building a Web3 Climate Movement

3 years ago · 2 likes · Deepa

Crypto Good

Pact DAO Building Hyper-Local City

I love the Pact DAO hyper-local mutual aid model and I believe many more cities will adopt this DAO model in the future. I interviewed Marisa, founder of Pact DAO to learn more. I had also recently spoken to someone who's involved in building a community currency for Oakland…

4 years ago · 1 like · Deepa

Crypto Good

A Multi-DAO Contributor Shares Everything on DAOs

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a new way of organizing people. DAOs are defined as internet native communities that come together around a common purpose. They are distributed teams with democratic governance and autonomous workflows powered by smart contracts on the blockchain…

4 years ago · 3 likes · Deepa

Crypto Good

The 19-Year Old Co-Founder on Building Dream DAO from Scratch

Dream DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that trains and funds Gen-Z leaders on doing good with crypto. Dream DAO came out of Civics Unplugged, a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. I interviewed the co-founder Madison who herself is a young leader (19 year old) on the origin story, impact, internal workings, and t…

4 years ago · 2 likes · Deepa

🌱All for Climate DAO Founders on Building a Web3 Climate Movement

Deepa — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:50:45 GMT

Crystal, a member of our DAO (Impact DAO Media), interviewed the co-founders, Leen and Xavier. Both the founders are big on governance principles of holacracy, sociocracy, and deep democracy. In addition, they are deeply inspired by the book, Reinventing Organizations, a bible for both DAOs and climate movements like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.

The two founders are one of the best thinkers on DAOs. The interview below is gold for anyone looking for the best in the DAO building.

C: Why did you decide to become a DAO? What was your motivation? Also, what defines you as a DAO?

X: We have been climate activists for a while. The climate movements are pushing for a sustainable future, but these movements are not sustainable. People are burning out doing activism and not being paid for it. So you must be actually highly privileged already to be able to participate. It shows that the problem is really deep.

It's a common belief that activism is a public good. But, like many other public goods, they are totally underserved and undervalued by the current capitalistic system.

Seeing the world of Web3 and DAOs, there's something exciting here. It's definitely worth exploring, and the best way to explore and learn is to do it.

So, we thought, let's just get started. Let's put up a discord server. Let's invite the community that we already have. The idea was - let's try to figure it out together; let's co-create this together. A DAO for climate movements, a 21st-century version of Greenpeace that will be decentralized, open to anyone, and value community work.

C: That's great. Lynn, do you wanna follow up with more about All for Climate in general?

L: Yeah. Those are the reasons why we wanted to become a DAO. Maybe adding one more reason to it that we've always been bridging worlds for activists. Our target group is citizens and activists, everyone working on climate and social justice projects.

There can be people starting a community garden and people who feel drawn to movements like Extinction Rebellion or Fridays for Future. So we've always been a bridge realizing that it was hard for grassroots citizens, for example, to apply for grants without setting up a nonprofit or opening up a bank account. Because it's mostly volunteer work, many people come and go. It's unsustainable because it must be combined with everyday life and going to work. So they are, by nature, very dynamic and limited in human resources.

And we thought a couple of years ago, 'Hey, why don't we start a shared infrastructure, shared bank account that all these collectives can use.’ And that's how All for Climate started.

We have all the legal stuff needed, we can receive donations and a bank account, and we use the Open Collective platform. So every collective's money is already by design via the Open Collective platform, decentralized and managed independently by every collective.

Then we bridge via the nonprofit and the collectives that want to apply for funding. So, for example, the European Climate Foundation or the Korea Foundation actually need this nonprofit legal structure for signatures. So then I come up, I sign, or I help them.

Then we discovered that there might be some exciting funds to make activism and community work sustainable in a financial way. And then last December (2011) we started bridging the old world with the new world by using Gitcoin, the web3 crowdfunding platform, to fundraise and provide a bridge to climate movements to web3.

Another reason is that we discovered that in the Web3/crypto world, the way people reorganize and rethink systems in a democratic, participatory way is very similar to activist movements. So we thought, 'My God, we should put those together. But, um, this is crazy, right?'

And in Web3, they call it a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). In the non-Web3, they read books by Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations, organizing via sociocracy, and holacracy. That's when we decided to transition away from using the old-school way of managing a nonprofit structure to a more DAO way of organizing. Which is much more organic, completely flat, and permissionless.

C: Excellent. And that's your specialty too. Your background is deep democracy, correct?

L: Yeah, I'd re-trained myself a couple of years ago as a deep democracy facilitator. Deep democracy is a mindset and a method for democratic decision-making. It's an inclusive decision-making tool and offers a new way of engaging in a conversation with each other. It's a different mindset where you start working with what is in the group.

There's also a little bit of trauma processing going on, and without that sounding too serious, it's also like, how can we feel those old forces? How do we recognize old patterns? How do we put them on the table, and how can we work together? How can we see the things living in us as a voice, put it on the table, and work together and transform? Without putting labels on people, without isolating people, but working with what is and how we can move forward inclusive in a democratic way.

So it doesn't always work only with the mind. It goes deep into the body and includes feelings, opinions, and frustrations that you feel like, 'Hey, what are you feeling there? What's the tension alive? How do you feel? Put it on the table; let's work with it.' The no voices, what is hiding there? And then how can we work in a different way that is not polarizing. And not really putting people against each other but seeing it more from a holistic point of view.

C: We touched on this already, but this is a fundamental core difference between a DAO and a traditional organization; it's everyone participating together, moving as one, you know, collective unit when possible.

When I explain what is happening to people outside of Web3, we are talking here about a new form of governance and a new way of engaging with one another and making decisions. We're in this messy experiment right now, but, you know, a few years down the road, this process can hit on a much larger scale and help redefine things.

I'm in the United States, and polarization is our jam. So when I work with you and participate in the training on sociocracy and deep democracy, it gives me hope. Because we're creating these new communities that are fundamentally working differently than what has traditionally happened.

We'd love to understand how work gets done in the DAO. How do you structure work and roles? Are there timelines? How do we track? Anything you can share about the organization of work itself would be great.

X: One key thing to understand is there is no hierarchy. We are all co-owners of the DAO, so we all have equal access to the treasury and the decision-making process. So the game really is for everyone. We are all the same, all first-class citizens.

The idea is to listen, identify common issues in the community and offer a solution. If it is a common issue, many people will vote for a proposed solution. Then, once there is an agreement, a new working group emerges. Then we identify who wants to work on this. What's important is to also have a leader, a 'locomotive,' we call them in All for Climate DAO because without locomotives, there is no movement.

There's got to be someone who's gonna take the lead and make sure meetings are happening, notes are being taken, etc. It doesn't have to be the locomotive that needs to do that, but someone has to be there to make sure that things are moving forward.

To get things done, we use task-based bounties, like, if you do this, you will receive that much. For example, for the last Gitcoin climate round, we wanted to have 10 Twitter spaces. So we asked who wanted to be a host for an hour, and we'll pay 100 DAI for each. People could claim the different available bounties. To claim the money, they will have to submit a link to the recording of the Twitter space, and physically mark it as done to get paid. Anyone can take the initiative to create those bounties or make a proposal.

L: I think we also spent a lot of time figuring out the essential roles in the DAO. It's really navigate by tension. I think they call it sociocracy. And that's how it works. Oh, we feel an itch. Like, Oh, you believe that too, odd. We should do something about it. Is this important enough? Yes, it is. Okay. We create a little bounty, a role, and we see what happens when somebody gets a little bit of pay.

We've been working with a platform called 'Dework' that's relatively easy because you have these nice boards with all the roles.

We also started working with a platform called 'Clarity'; we can create some circles there. Since we follow the sociocracy training, we are inspired by creating circles. The circles help people from outside the DAO that want to start contributing. They know a little bit more and have more clarity on the roles, who the people are, where the circles are, and where I can contribute. So we think these tools are pretty essential.

X: It's still very early days, and those two are only emerging now. So it's also unclear which tools will still be there in a year or two.

Most of the tools out there have been built for an economic tissue made of hierarchies with managers reporting. All those concepts need to be reinvented for this world of DAOs. Before you had employees, you now have co-owners in DAOs. So how do you organize where anyone in the organization can take the lead and become a manager just for a week, a month, or three months, and then anyone can start another project? You know, it's interesting.

It's scary at times, too, because we don't know, we don't have like 50 years of books, you know, all those books you buy in airports. But the good news is that climate activists don't go to airports, so they're not being poisoned by all those management books. So, we need a lot of new books and developing good practices and tools to support such a new way of organizing.

C: I think the tools, the framework, and the deep democracy-type frameworks are essential. What I'm finding for myself is that I've been working in structures for 25 years. I am not used to just anyone being able to manage at any time. Then I'm also seeing my own shortcomings of procrastination. I'm like, 'Oh wait, other people, are involved in this. I can't put this off until the last minute. Here's this framework I need to look at.' So it's an exciting mental mind shift that has to happen when you get deep into DAOs. And to have those infrastructures in place. It really does make stepping into this world a little more coherent, I guess.

So, tokenomics: do you issue tokens? How are these given and defined?

X: We just started as a way to basically have our own kind of community currency. It can be used to acknowledge and reward people that contribute, even though we may not have the money yet to pay them. So at least, there is this recognition. And then, hopefully, as more money comes in, people will be able to exchange that currency for fiat or other currencies they might need based on their needs. So right now, it's mainly used more as a, like, equity in a startup, equity that is worth nothing at the beginning but with the hope that at some point will be worth something.

We also allocate based on the different people that contribute to the various collectives that are part of the 160 plus other collectives, so it's already decentralized. So we recognize the people who spend the time to verify and approve their expenses submitted by fellow activists in whatever actions they're doing. We also recognize the people who donate money to support those different collectives with tokens.

L: Yeah, I think the token is our way of experimenting. It's really an experiment for community building and an experiment to solve that issue that we started with in the beginning - activism/community building is a public good that is very under-rewarded. It's not financially sustainable. People are doing it in their free time. They are burning out while they are working for a sustainable world. So how can we maybe issue a token that creates a little bit of that reward, feeling rewarded and seen for the work they put out there for everyone. So it's an experiment. We don't know where it will go, but we are trying.

X: I think one thing that I would say, though, and the reason why we started, is that the first utility of the token is to really have a map of all the people that did contribute to the network. So that when you need to make decisions, you can invite all of those token holders to vote.

It's a good data point to know what other people who have, you know, most tokens, like, what do they think? Because at the end of the day, they're the ones who basically make All for Climate what it is today. We want to avoid people coming in and buying a bunch of tokens.

C: Delegation, too, I think a combination of community tokens and delegation as well, so that if they are sold, they still have to travel through someone directly connected, actively with the DAO.

What was the token design process? Did you all do it in-house or have external help or guidance? Did you look at other DAOs for inspiration when you made the token?

X: We made the token. Practices like keeping 50% for the treasury and those types of things. We made a couple of goals within the community where everyone was invited to participate and share what was essential. For example, what we just talked about is that the community is not for sale and also to recognize that not everyone has the exact needs. What does the community value?

We also decided to apply a qualitative algorithm to the money that people donate to the community, so it might cost $1 to get one token, but it will cost $10 to get two tokens.

It's exponentially expensive to get more tokens. This is to value the actual time contribution rather than the contribution of money.

So we don't want to reward that more than necessary. We don't want people to make a lot of money to buy a lot of voting tokens and voting power. All of those types of things. So then you iterate a couple of times, and then we propose a proposal. Then the sociocracy style is, 'is this good enough for now and safe enough to try? And we say, 'Okay, let's do it. rinse, repeat.'

C: What does voting look like in your organization? Does every decision come up for a vote? What voting style do you use?

L: We have a proper voting system in place. I think everything is decided via a community process, more in calls and with a proposal written in a Google doc, and then we talk about it. There's a lot of commenting going on, and then I think we make a decision good enough, for now, safe enough to try. It's more the feedback; is it working or it's not?

I do think that we will need a more formalized voting system when All for Climate is growing. But I think right now, the working groups are okay. We actually don't have the size that we have to set up a proper voting system. But, the working groups are small enough to take votes. So, for now, that works.

C: How do contributors learn about your DAO, and do you have a process to engage with them?

L: I think most people get to know us via Twitter, and we did the Gitcoin grants. I think we really started growing then. There is an onboarding process - we have an onboarding 'locomotive' setting up a procedure. We do onboarding calls every week. I think the move to 'Clarity' is helpful with onboarding in mind so that people have a clearer view of what is happening and where I would like to contribute.

C: How vital is onboarding for a DAO?

L: Well, extremely. Maybe I also have to add before I forget - there is, of course, the DAO, but there's also the fiscal host. So that's where I do the onboarding. An onboarding call with every collective we onboard are at least a half-hour call. So how important is it? I think it's vital!

We just put one of the values in All for Climate is that All for Climate really is about human conversations and human connections.

So, building a network of people where you feel welcome, where there are friendly people candidly smiling at you and saying, 'Hey, what are you dreaming about? And what's going on for you out there? Where would you like to contribute, and how can we help with that? Can we help you set up a new project, maybe? Here is the common infrastructure, and we can help you through that and go ahead. Or do you wanna join one of the existing projects?'

So it's really a very 1-1 conversation. People have the time to look around; there's no pressure. Human conversation, human-centered, is very, very, very important. So community building is definitely a value we want to see.

X: It can be overwhelming when you arrive in a discord server, and it's all those channels and conversations. You don't even know what you can say and who is who, so having this first human touch is so important. And then also the need for community calls where the community can see the common issues? So all of that basically helps everyone. So yeah, onboarding plus community calls are fundamental pillars in the DAO.

C: Yeah, this is the first DAO I've joined that had an onboarding human-to-human call. The other DAO I'm active in is so tiny that our town hall includes the whole team. And those are the two that I am the most committed to because it is about human relationships.

So I think onboarding and, as you said, Lynn, that human connection from the very beginning is probably more important, that other stuff can be built later.

X: People stay for the community. You stay because of the connected relationships and the people you meet. At the end of the day, money and tokens, it's just numbers. What we are craving is meaningful relationships and opportunities to grow and learn through those relationships.

L: I also think the global connection that we want to create. We have this thing rooted locally (like all the collectives we host, they are active just in their neighborhood, their cities, or where they are). And the All for Climate common infrastructure puts this globally connected layer on top of that. Some digital infrastructure stuff that is open for everybody; a Twitter account that you can use, a newsletter that's for everybody to put content in. But the human connection is where you feel like, 'oh wow, I'm part of a global movement. There are people worldwide, and you can connect with that community. So I think that's what All for Climate is providing, that globally connected, rooted local ethos.

C: Can you describe fundraising and income activities? Do you only raise in crypto or fiat? How do you manage the funds?

X: It started with the Gitcoin Climate round. We started working with them last December (2021). We had the opportunity to raise money for All for Climate DAO, which was really the main chunk of the money we had to play with for now.

We also want to avoid raising all the money centralized within the DAO in a single multi-sig. So what we do is whenever there is a project, we create new crowdfunding for that particular project. So now there are Artists for Climate. They have their own multi-sig.

Regens Unite which started within the All for Climate DAO, also has its own multi-sig and went ahead and raised money. So they have already raised more money than All for Climate, which is excellent.

You also want the decision-making process to be totally decentralized. Now that the projects have different wallets, they decide how best to use the funds. It doesn't matter if you're within All for Climate or not; do you agree that we need more solarpunk art? Yes. Okay, boom, here we go.

C: When I was putting the newsletter together for All for Climate DAO, I finally had time to go through and look at all the stuff and what the Artist for Climate Collective, and then the solarpunk has done within, you know, under the big umbrella.

I was shocked they've got their own multi-sig, and you had explained this to me. Still, I didn't quite conceptualize it because I'm so used to what we talked about earlier that, you know, traditional organizational structure. And then when I saw what they were actually doing, I was like, 'Oh, this is what Xavier was talking about. That's what it looks like in action.'

So it's really amazing. Its organization rises up with the organization.

X: In a traditional organization, the money needs to go to that single bank account, then you have a CEO, then all of that hierarchy, and then you need to do politics to go get the budget. That's all ego-driven, right? Then you can say, 'I manage such a big budget, and I have so many people, you know, in this organization that depends on this budget.' It gives you this false feeling of importance; its politics, it ego.

Our goal at All for Climate DAO is to connect people who share similar goals and to help them set up their own multi-sig to fund their mission.

We are just here as a support. If you're more successful than All for Climate, even better. That's kind of what's happening now with Regens Unite. That's fantastic.

L: All for Climate DAO's goal is always to help people be as successful as possible in their projects for the climate. That's why we are here. Like we allow you to be as successful as possible because we depend on it as a planet. So accessibility to resources, accessibility to decision making, to ownership as fast as we can. So we are here really to help people do that.

It doesn't work if we tell everybody what to do. So go figure it out, and here are some common infrastructure and tools you can use and go figure out. Then tell us what worked and what didn't work. So that's really what All for Climate does.

C: Can you tell us about the tools you use to power your DAO?

L: Open Collective, of course. Clarity, Dework, the Discord, gnosis safe. We also share, for example, a Zoom account. We have a Twitter that everybody has access to and an Instagram that everybody has access to. We have a shared Google Drive with templates and stuff that people can just take if they need. We have a GitBook as well.

X: It's all about coordination and giving access to information to everyone. Everybody should know how much money there is in the treasury at all times and what other people are thinking, so there's got to be some documentation that we build up together, a knowledge base of past meetings and stuff.

We talked earlier about how most of the tools have been designed with this concept of permission. Because they've been designed for hierarchies where everyone had different permission. Whereas in this case, actually, well, pretty much there are not that many levels of permissions, and in fact, we, at least in read-only, everyone has access to everything. The only permission is more about who can make a change, basically. So even there, we are very, very open.

C: What have been your strengths and challenges as a DAO?

L: We are a resilient community with friendly and motivated people. That's absolutely a strength. People really want to work. They really want to be there. They're also accommodating. They also care a lot about rewarding people for the work they do. We respect each other.

The challenge is financial sustainability. We put so much effort into promoting and helping other collectives and projects that we are not financially sustainable. We've been doing this for two and a half years, and we have not been able to pay a single rent from the money we earn.

It takes time to become an overnight success, and we are not there yet, that's for sure. So we are spending this time even though we still have no certainty on whether or not this would be a financially sustainable endeavor. But we believe in it. We want to make this work. We continued because other people started joining and contributing, which is fantastic.

The other strength is onboarding and also open-mindedness. There's a lot of pushback in the climate movement against crypto. In All for Climate, you have this community of people willing to explore. I think it's important because we know that we need system change, not climate change, but nobody has the answer; otherwise, we would already be there. So if you don't have the answer, then the best second thing you can do is explore.

And the worst thing you can do is keep going with the current system; that's not helping. So that's being comfortable and, in a way, lazy. Still, of course, not everyone has the same opportunities, sadly, to explore. So it belongs to the people who can do it for different reasons, share what they learn, and make it easier and more accessible. People who don't have the same privileges, and have less time to dedicate to this, can still start exploring themselves. And then, slowly but surely, more and more people will join the movement, and I hope to free people from wage slavery, from that system based on a digital generative economy.

C: You touched on something too that I think is essential. There's so much hesitation around Web3 and crypto because of what the media puts out there.

When I tell people I work with a climate DAO, they're like, 'What?'. And I said, 'Yeah! And these people are not just like, let's use paper straws. I mean, these are actually real active activists. So they're not going to use the technology burning the planet. There's a reason they're here.'

X: In the end, action speaks louder than words. There is no amount of social media reactions that's gonna change people's opinions. We just need to show people.

So yeah, that's what we are doing here by walking the walk. We're not just arguing. We escape the noise of all those social media, clickbait, and stuff. We just put our heads down and focus on what we can do together using the new tools, the new superpowers. Suppose it truly holds the key to the genesis of a new regenerative economy. In that case, the result will speak for itself. Either way, there is no point in arguing.

L: Adding to that, if web3 can give us the tools, a community currency, maybe, that will finally reward the community, then, by all means, let's embrace it and make sure that it is about building communities and not about anything else.

At this moment in our system, community work is not rewarded. The people that do community work are really the least rewarded; nurses, teachers, and community workers; are taken for granted. We need to change that. Those people are our safety net, or like we always say, 'community is immunity.'

So if we can use these new tools to do that, to build resilient communities, regenerative communities, then, by all means, we need to stay in this space and contribute to this space.

X: And I think it's like the beginning of the internet in many ways. We have known about this climate crisis since the seventies, before the internet. Still, in a world of centralized media channels, controlling what gets out is pretty easy. So it took the invention of the internet to get that information out.

Once you decentralize, you lose control over who gets to do what. So the internet has decentralized publication of information, sharing information to a point where, you know, all those planet movements exist today, thanks to the internet. Now we need the same for economic systems.

We need a new internet, not the internet of information, but the internet of money, of the economy. That's what this is all about. But, of course, it's not perfect. Of course, at first, it's not optimized because, like with anything new, the first version, it's just a proof of concept that does a lot of things that don't work very well.

We are still so early. So our goal with All For Climate is to break that taboo and say, 'No, you absolutely can be for the climate and into Web3.’ This is not an antagonist relationship.

Like you absolutely can be at the intersection of that. In fact, we need you to be there because we shape tools, then the tools shape us, and we want those climate activists.

We want the people who care about communities, about the environment to be in the driver's seat. So to use those technologies, creating those new templates for DAOs to ensure that the tools will be used for doing good in the world and building the future we want.

L: It's our moral obligation to be there. Otherwise, we've missed it again, and then it's the bad guys again. So, no, let's be there from the start. Get active. Really!

🎙 Leen and Xavier were interviewed on August 1st, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project.

🙏 BIG thanks to Gregory Stock of Secret Sauce design agency for probono design services🌟

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or join our Discord.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Pact DAO Building Hyper-Local City

Deepa — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 22:11:06 GMT

Marisa, Founder Pact DAO

I love the Pact DAO hyper-local mutual aid model and I believe many more cities will adopt this DAO model in the future. I interviewed Marisa, founder of Pact DAO to learn more.

I had also recently spoken to someone who's involved in building a community currency for Oakland, California. So my objective with speaking to Pact DAO was also to understand if there was some cross-over learnings and if the two city-based DAOs would inform and inspire each other's work.

D: Tell me about yourself and how did you get involved with Pact DAO?

M: I'm Marisa, born and raised in New York. I started Pact, a community group turned nonprofit turned DAO in 2020. My background is in marketing. I had done pro bono marketing efforts for different non-profit organizations and grassroots groups.

The problem is charitable organizations are caught in this loop where they don't have the excess funds to market themselves. Even these larger nonprofits that do are criticized for it.

Charitable groups are held to an impossible standard that 100% of the money should be going directly to the cause.

So that's how I got involved with these grass root organizations. It was just like really helping them to get the message out there.

I used to live in the Bay Area and people would say things like, “oh man, I wish there was someone doing something about the homeless issue here.” And I'm like, “there are countless organizations in this city, but you just don't know about them.”

We started Pact to promote the grassroots organizations doing work on the ground in NYC.

At the time a lot of friends were just texting me,” hey, who should I be supporting right now?” Because you do a Google search and it's a Red Cross or something like these big mega-corporate feeling non-profits which people didn't wanna donate to.

Or there were Instagram posts like here's the top 50 grassroots organizations to be giving to and people don't know how to sort through a list of 50. Shopping for an organization to give to isn't really an intuitive experience.

So we created Pact in 2020. New York was hit very hard by the pandemic.

Pact at that time was a donation subscription service where we were promoting a different hyper-local grassroots organization each month.

We were starting to notice a few things. One was that, all of these groups, we were working with, were working to address a similar goal. Many of them were abolition forward or hosted different types of unions, like tenant unions or labor unions. And many of them were working in food justice because even in New York City, there are many pockets of food deserts. And we were starting to wonder how we can bring these groups closer together? Rather than supporting them in a kind of campaign way, how can we build a coalition with them?

Even in looking at our own setup, our company was incorporated very quickly because of the urgency of the issue. And we set up as a single-member LLC and had a US bank account. That meant that my name was on everything. And while our team was a trusted group of collaborators, we called ourselves a collective, we were running based on cooperative principles and doing our best to research what that looked like at the time.

Those were all just spoken principles.

We wanted to figure out how to make Pact something that other organizations can plug into by design and not have us be this centralized bank or passthrough because then we're just like another nonprofit and so we had explored million solutions.

We were trying to talk to lawyers and piece together some kind of solution or think about the tech we could build. And then, I came across friends that were in this web3 space that I had rejected for a while, because I was just like, “ew, crypto, this feels like hyper-capitalist. I'm not into it.”

A few friends were working on DAOs and they told me about what that looked like and multi-signature wallets and smart contracts. And we just had this aha moment of, “oh these are the tools that we were looking for. These are the tools that our organization needs to build a coalition and like scale collaboration outside of what we're doing now.

And so that was our way into web3, having this immediate need for our organization.

I hear a lot about the Oakland project and I think what they're doing is really cool. I'm excited to see how they develop. They seem like a really smart team as well. But what we're doing is something quite different.

We are not minting a token or creating a local currency for New York. What we see as a big strength in web3 are the collaboration tools.

We're doing our best to get that into the hands of organizers because there are enumerable really impactful groups in New York.

And so we're trying to build a kind of collaboration with these networks and work with the people doing the work on the ground. That's been the bulk of our focus.

D: That's great. By the way, on nonprofit marketing, charity: water, an NYC-based global nonprofit does a fabulous job. They changed the face of non-profit marketing. Before them, there were always pictures of people in despair, but they instead got happy faces and projected the positive side of getting access to water. I have big respect for charity water, they really emphasized design and visual storytelling.

And I totally agree with you on how nonprofits are punished for spending on marketing while it's so critical to creating awareness.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area too, which year were you there?

M: From 2016 to 2018, it was a pretty short thing.

D: So coming back to PACT DAO what does the donation subscription model really mean?

M: It’s recurring donations. So what we did at the time because, I'm not an engineer. We were just trying to work with the skills that our team had and get things happening quickly because of the need at the time.

We created this website where you can donate for either $3, $10, or $25 a month. We made it pretty low and accessible because there were tons of people that wanted to help. Also, it was COVID and many people had lost their jobs.

We created this really accessible donation tier so that people could be in our network - get regular updates on different protests and different things that are happening in the city. And make them feel like a part of a solution without needing to be based on them having a lot of money.

D: How did you get the word out about Pact when you started in 2020?

M: It's funny because the first iteration of Pact was literally just a website that I created for my friends who again were like texting me and being like, “where could I give?” And they had just shared that with a bunch of their friends.

And I had ended up moving $10,000 of just friends and friends of friends money. So I was like, “Okay, this needs to be automated.”

We started a monthly micro-donation model. And from there, how we got the word out, um, we tried Facebook ads for a quick second. This was all just like putting our money behind it.

Even though we were getting high click-through on Facebook Ads people need to feel a sense of trust to give something. And we were just sharing it on our personal accounts. Like friends of friends were sharing it. We had some press written about us as well from a couple of local, smaller publications or even a couple tech outlets wrote about us. And so we amassed a really good amount of support that way.

D: In 2021 you transitioned into being a DAO, which month would it be?

M: We launched our crowdfunding on Mirror in September of last year.

D: How many people were involved in the transition process from a nonprofit to a DAO

M: We have a core team of five and I think three of us were involved in the transition. Now our team fluctuates in terms of contributors because we aren't paying regular salaries or anything like that.

People contribute as they can. But I think we have about a solid, like five to six core team members now.

D: What was the thought process like? How did you decide that you should launch yourself as a DAO? What was the first thing you did to move from the nonprofit space to the DAO that declared you as a DAO?

M: Yeah, it was cool, like our personal discovery process or my personal discovery process was talking to a lot of the people in this space.

I created a Twitter account, as many people do when they get into web3.

I started following people that my friends recommended, they knew my values and what I was trying to do. They recommended a few people that have now become friends of mine, like The Blockchain Socialist, Austin, Stefen. These are all the people I followed early on. We just got talking about how they were thinking about the space and what they had been working on.

I think for us, our transition came via doing more research ourselves, putting the mirror crowdfund out there, and seeing what people thought. A lot of people were getting really excited about our vision.

Mirror was this space where this manifesto of ours was gonna live but definitely continues to grow as we are now actually operating more democratically versus like when we started.

One thing that we are continuing to do from web2 is that our donation engine continues to run and we continue to support USD contributions.

We want web3 to be a gateway and not a blocker.

Many people, including many of the organizations that we were fundraising for, when we shared with them that we were looking into web3, they were like, “ we're not interested. No thanks.”

They just had a lot of both, either negative feedback about the space or even were like how am I gonna use this? I can't pay somebody's rent with Eth. I need real USD. And so we took that feedback and again, wanted to allow everyone to participate.

So we're continuing to straddle both worlds.

D: Mirror is great. We've been looking into fundraising on Mirror too. We are publishing a book on Impact DAOs and we want to give out the digital copy totally free, so people don’t have to think twice before building in web3

But there are a lot of discussions internally at our DAO about having a hard copy and minting it on Mirror and letting people pre-order. And it makes sense. People like to hold books and maybe take the book to a park to read or on the bus. So we are looking into the Mirror mint.

And I will come back to you to learn more about the Mirror fundraise or maybe you can share it right here for everybody to learn and benefit from your learnings.

Mirror is your primary source of fundraising, right besides Gitcoin grants?

M: Yeah. We've done Gitcoin grants. But Mirror is our primary source of fundraising however we haven’t really been promoting our fundraiser much.

I think that now we've really aligned as a DAO and we have a clear vision, going into season one, we're going to get back into promoting this crowdfund as well as our traditional USD campaign on our website.

Mirror's interface is really beautiful. It helped us reach that audience in a really meaningful way at the time. They had a ton of features so it felt very seamless to do.

The only hang-up for us with Mirror crowdfunding is that the funds are tied up in the account until you decide to close it. Like you can't incrementally take funds out of the account.

D: Oh, okay! That's good to know. You can't access those funds until you reach your goal, right? Like either you shut it down or you meet that goal and then get the funds out.

Also is there a way to create an org account on Mirror or does it have to be linked to an individual account?

M: I think that they do that now, but when we launched ours, they didn't connect to multi-sig yet.

D: So yeah, That's so important. I feel like these web3 platforms are not designed for DAOs (orgs) yet. Like I was looking into another fundraising platform for another DAO that I was volunteering with and we wanted to have the multi-sig connected to the campaign. But the process was that we needed to connect an individual wallet first, create the profile, and then manually get it changed.

You posted your pitch on Mirror as a blog post?

M: We have it as a crowdfund. So there's crowd entries, and a couple of other ways to raise. The crowdfund is where you can do something like an NFT collection.

D: Are you doing like an NFT collection on Mirror then?

M: Our crowdfund does have NFTs and all the NFTs I support as well are not like speculative art NFTs, they're just beautiful donation receipts. Like membership cards to our DAO but we do have NFTs attached to the crowdfund.

D: So people then mint your article by paying for it and then it belongs to them. Like they're part of it now.

M: They collect the NFT, yes.

D: So the folks who’ve minted your NFT are you thinking of ways to engage them in your organization?

M: Yeah, like we have discord and so when somebody purchases our NFT, they get invited into our discord, and the same with if they subscribe for $3 a month.

We don't have this incredibly high barrier to being a part of our community. So once you're in our discord they can be part of our team calls which are in the open channel in our discord. So you can hear what our team is talking about. We host a lot of events. We put documents out for feedback. I'm actually about to share the season one draft with our community next week to see what they think. And yeah, it starts to feel more and more collaborative.

D: That's right. Discord is such a great platform. I know it's web2, but it is so good. Especially like I've also worked in the nonprofit sector and I understand the game. With the DAO model donors can now be glued to what's happening within the organization. Otherwise, donors are left out.

Once you take the money, you just share quarterly or annual reports and that's it. And I feel like many times donors want to be part of the process, like what's going on because they're invested in the cause they've actually put their money behind it.

Also, Discord is like a virtual office, anyone can come in and check out your org, participate if they want to, or quietly observe. It's such a great tool, giving visibility into your organization.

What other tools do you use for collaboration?

M: We have a multi-sig for our team. Honestly, at the moment, that's largely our toolkit. We're not looking to build a bunch of technology, but we are going to be building out a digital resource library for grassroots organizers. What we're focusing on because we're local to New York is a lot of IRL events.

Right now, I guess we are the classic, a DAO with discord and multi-sig.

D: Yeah, we are the same and also Google Docs.

M: That reminds me we do use a little bit of Notion and we also have an account with Wonderverse, they have a really cool integration with Notion. Right now we don't use it as frequently just because we're a really small team. And a lot of our conversations feel like, here are quick action items in discord, like in our team chat versus needing a whole project management system.

D: So Wonderverse is a project management tool?

M: Yes, it's a project management tool.

D: Oh, so we use Dework for that. It's a great tool, it has integration with Metamask and you can directly pay your contributors and issue bounties, etc. Wonderverse sounds great too and we’ll look into it for our list of tools section in our Impact DAO book.

In terms of tokens, you said you're not gonna be issuing any tokens. What's your thought behind it and do you think it's gonna change in the future?

M: Yeah, I'm not positive if it's gonna change in the future.

I think it would just be a long and thoughtful process, not to suggest that groups who have tokens are not thoughtful at all. But I do think that there is a tendency to create the token and then figure it out after.

We don't want a token, especially one that's meant to represent mutual aid and support in our community and be something that people in the community start to rely on for groceries or for rent for it to be subject to volatility in the way that many tokens are.

We're gonna be really careful if ever we create a public token because it is pretty consequential.

D: That's right. I agree with you on the token side of things.

But tokens do have a good side too. I've been having so many interviews around Impact DAOs and Human DAO is one such example that issued tokens and did a token sale and raised money for their operations. And that’s fabulous if you are in the social impact space you don’t have to then ask for funds, you create your own. And if you can have a really good thought process behind it and manage the speculative side of things, maybe set a greater moral standard around tokens, which doesn't harm people.

Human DAO’s token sale enabled them to make an impact in the Philippines and now they are expanding to Argentina and Nigeria with their new product. And same goes with Gitcoin, they sustain their operations through tokenomics and pass on 100% of funds raised on their platform to grantees.

I feel like in the future, if there are better ways to do those token economies that do not cause harm will be so cool.

But then if you are not going to have tokens how would you then vote on matters? Because a lot of DAOs use tokens for governance and democratic decision-making as well. Btw, we at our startupy DAO use emojis to vote on matters and it works great so far.

M: Right now, because we as PACT filed as a 501c3, we are a US nonprofit. We're in the process of updating our bylaws to be more radical and DAO-friendly. Right now standard nonprofit bylaws largely say that the board of directors has power over everything which is obviously very centralized and it's not a democratic model at all.

We're in the process of reworking our bylaws to have roles for both the board of directors, which is like this unbiased group that kind of sits outside of PACT but they are integral to the decision making and the worker members who we call comrades, which are like our working team. And then Supporter members, which are like everybody who's contributed to our USD fund or our Mirror crowd fund etc.

We're in the process of outlining those in our bylaws, which we're gonna share with our group soon. Which is really exciting, to shake up the non-profit model from its very traditional sense.

As a DAO if we were to break a promise, like for instance on snapshot, the web3 voting system, there's not really a legal entity or anything that many people can do to hold the DAO accountable and to act the way the proposal was voted on.

But because we are also a non-profit and we are writing these rules that are built into our bylaws, we have both broader accountability, as well a new template for bylaws to bring to the nonprofit space.

We're working on those now. For now, it’s been pretty informal. I assume that will change after our bylaws roll out.

D: And how has this process been engaging with lawyers and changing the bylaws? A lot of people have these questions. Lots of people, you have no idea, just figuring out the legal stuff.

Btw, if you can share your lawyer's details for others and if he wants to be a standby resource for anybody who's dealing with questions like these, that’ll be awesome.

What has your own research around the legalities of things been?

M: I think that things are pretty challenging and that at least for a group like ours, one, it's hard to find a lawyer that wants to, or is willing to do anything for a reasonable price.

We were lucky to find someone who is super value aligned through The Blockchain Socialist. And he's helping us think about this more democratically and is very aware of DAOs and crypto.

For an organization like ours or other Impact DAOs, I think it's really important to find an accountant, a lawyer, and a tax person who is value-aligned.

D: I agree we’ve had similar experiences with two organizations who didn’t even try to understand us and quoted us insane prices. So it's so important to find value-aligned partners.

Maybe you want to check with your accountant and lawyer if they are open to taking on more organizations like yours.

M: Yes, I'll reach out to him and see if I can either use his name publicly or recommend him to other groups because I agree it’s nearly impossible to find online, like a lawyer or tax person, etc who knows crypto and the cooperative space.

D: So a couple more questions. I want to clear some misconceptions about DAOs. People think they are structureless, and not very efficient but I've been living a DAO life myself and then I've seen Gitcoin customer service. When I was doing the GR14 fundraising I opened at least five tickets and they all got answered within a few minutes. So I'm like, wow, they're more efficient than a lot of Silicon Valley tech companies. For instance, I use a couple of subscription services, and I sometimes open tickets there too and their turnaround time is two days. So I'm like, this Gitcoin DAO is so efficient.

So just trying to understand how have you structured your DAO and how work gets done.

M: One thing that I really like about our group is it's very thoughtful. We realize the gravity of what we're working with. I work in tech during the day and I think it's very much just about output.

And here at Pact, we're being a little bit more careful and not focusing on a roadmap or something like it.

We had a collaborative workshop series where we brought people who are working in mutual aid in web3 and people who are working in mutual aid in a more traditional sense, together for a panel discussion. And one of the people who spoke is Dean Spade.

He’s the writer of the book Mutual Aid that many people in the DAO space, even those who do not participate in mutual aid have read because these mutual aid groups run very similarly to how we want DAOs to run.
Dean Spade said that the primary “metric of success” in these groups is in relationships. Sometimes web3 tools allow us to bypass relationships because we could all purchase the same NFT and be authenticated into this group but do we have shared values?

Do we have a relationship with each other? Like how efficiently is a DAO going to operate if it’s full of people who just bought some high ticket NFT versus people who care about the same things?

In terms of our group, we've spent a lot of our season zero which has just been like this initial phase really building relationships. And I think seeing what works organically first and then following those roads.

I think that when we first started, we had this idea that we were just gonna put a bunch of money into a multi-sig and bring organizers in and they were like, “we don't get this. We don't like this.What are we going to do with this?”

It didn't work out the way that we thought it would. And in the meantime, we've been hosting educational workshops so that people could learn more about web3 and have this open space to organize. We've been bringing more of our members into the community, via activism, helping mutual aid groups going to community gardens and going to protests together.

I might be belaboring this question or not even answering it directly, so please feel free to reign me back in. But I think that we've been focusing on building the two things I'm trying to get at here are, building the relationship both between the members within our community, and with our local community. And the second thing is kind of like trying something first and if it doesn't work, letting it flop, if it works, okay, this is the direction we need to go.

I don't think it's right for us to make decisions on behalf of what would work best for the community. We need to be in constant contact with the local New York City community to find out what they need.

D: That’s the right way to go. Even with the book that we are writing on Impact DAOs, we will never put anything prescriptive or strict around how DAOs should operate. Our goal is to share stories, inspire others to build, and let people see a common pattern across all the DAOs that we have listed. We will never say, “this is the person in the DAO that does this.” We believe every DAO is gonna be different and will be designed differently for the needs that they're gonna meet.

I keep saying this to myself because I've also spent so much time in Silicon Valley that the SV mindset and web3 values are a very strong combination. Like the SV mindset is always questioning the status quo, building, iterating, and course correcting.

I'm not talking about the SV culture but the mindset, that’s entrepreneurial. It's so powerful. Like the SV gave us all the tools that we are using today and maybe down the line, they forgot their values. But web3 reminds us that these are the values that we need to build around.

So coming back to Pact DAO what do you call your departments, do you have a name for them?

M: Yeah. If I'm honest, since our team is fairly small, we're about six, and we have different sub channels within our team. And so we would call them workstreams.

In our team, there's like the general team chat, but then there is also a channel on event planning, partnerships, and organizing, there are a couple of different categories within that.

D: In terms of impact, how do you define impact for Pact DAO?

M: Wow, big question. Yeah, I think that things feel good, really good in the relationships that we're building. Obviously, the more IRL-like impact is important.

The money that comes out of PACT and goes into our community is obviously a really significant and beautiful measure. Something we'll definitely center a lot of our goals around.

But I also think again, I know it sounds cheesy but I really resonated when Dean said that relationship is what matters.

Because again our ultimate goal is to build a coalition among these efforts in New York.

There are tons of revolutionary groups doing great work but they're doing them in silos.

So rather than let's just say three disparate protests happening around the city, there's one gigantic one. Instead of three public safety alternatives to the police that are being built, we could help build one and actually try to overcome these systems with people's power.

The relationship is the best measure, whether they use a multi-sig in that or not. And we are going to bat for these web3 tools because we do think that they are really great and revolutionary tools.

And that's where we can come in - offer the money, offer that education, offer that onboarding. At the end of the day, it's gonna be about the relationships that are made.

A framework that our group is following is called dual power. It's a revolutionary framework that was developed by Lenin. And it talks about how to achieve revolutionary change.

You need to be working on two sides. You need to be both counter-power, which is like protesting, political education, getting the word out. But that alone won't bring us prosperity. For example screaming, defund the police, or abolish the police will not work if we aren't simultaneously building an institution that could replace it.

We need to also build this collaborative network of people who are doing this kind of revolutionary work, like building an alternative to the police. If we can be the connective tissue for that, if we can help fund that effort that these people-led democratic institutions would be my biggest dream for Pact.

D: Okay this will be my last question - any learnings you’ve had and advice for folks entering web3

M: For people who wanna get started in web3, I'd say find the people like you in the space. I think that there are multitudes of different types of people, just like there are multitudes of people building technology or building anything really.

I do think that there's more than the tech bro or whatever that is really promoted in the web3 space. And I've been lucky to find those people early on in my journey. Otherwise, if I hadn't, I wouldn't have continued.

Like if I had just googled crypto prominent people, it would've been like, “all right. I'm out.”

So you gotta just find the people that are like you and maybe that comes with talking to your like-minded friends

As for the learnings that we've had as a group I think it really is that slowing down is important.

I think there is a beauty about the tech mindset of you know let’s try some things, let's have some fun. Like, let's keep things moving forward. Like we don't need to overanalyze everything.

I think with things like mutual aid and certain impact projects we need to be careful of the effect that has on people.

And I'm gonna butcher this quote, but Audrey Tang the Director of Digital Democracy in Taiwan said something to the effect of real trust building comes with co-creating.

I think that a lot of DAOs definitely need to start centralized, in some way. Because otherwise nothing would get done if everything was just an open question. But I think to build relationships, you really need to invite people to the table as early on as possible.

If I'm honest like we continued with the name Pact because we had started Pact in 2020. And we had some relationships with organizers locally so it felt good to just continue that but if I could go back in time, I would start Pact as something completely new.

Having a name, having an entity already set up, when we were reaching out to mutual aid groups and wanting to collaborate and wanting to build something together, they were like, “oh, but you guys are Pact. You guys are already a thing.”

I think that added this layer of skepticism. The grassroots community was like, “You're this web3 crypto group? What do you guys want from us?” Versus just being like, “Hey, we're a bunch of people in the community who wanna work with you and have a knowledge and skill set in this type of technology, and all of these different things that we wanna bring to your group. And we wanna collaborate with you.”

I think inviting the people that you wanna work with, like the people that, may be in the tech world, would identify as your ‘users’ or ‘your customers’ bringing them into your creation process as early in as possible is something valuable that we've learned.

That's so true, thank you for sharing your story and we are glad to have you part of our study. 🔶

🎙 Marisa was interviewed on July 28th, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project.

Marisa with her peeps at a Brooklyn Community Garden

This post is part of a series on the Impact DAOs Research + Book project. This project is by a collective of folks in web3 + impact + media. The team members on Twitter are @tranimal, @katerinabohlec, @Abeers123, @Poplinecreation, @crystaldstreet, @0xSardius, @karanth_harsha, @actThreeCC, @0xSiddhearta, @Value_Strat, @zaldarren, @astrocruz_s, @ashisharora27, @pop_timism, @alkohlmist, @ikonoklast, @bjuglas + Kim on LI

🙏 BIG thanks to Gregory Stock of Secret Sauce design agency on designing our media assets in record time. 🌟

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The 19-Year Old Co-Founder on Building Dream DAO from Scratch

Deepa — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 14:16:31 GMT

Madison Co-founder Dream DAO

Dream DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that trains and funds Gen-Z leaders on doing good with crypto. Dream DAO came out of Civics Unplugged, a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

I interviewed the co-founder Madison who herself is a young leader (19 year old) on the origin story, impact, internal workings, and their relationship with Civics Unplugged, the nonprofit.

While this 19 year old is way smarter than us we did get in a cool fact that totally surprised her, read till the end to find out what that was.

I’d love to understand the initial days of Dream DAO. From the time you came up with the thought of becoming a DAO and transitioning from a registered US nonprofit to a DAO.

A lot of who we are comes from the parent organization of Dream DAO, which is called Civics Unplugged, a nonprofit that trains young people from all over the world to be civic innovators. The primary way that's done is through a 10-week online civic innovation fellowship.

The broad mission of Civics Unplugged is to train the next generation of leaders who will solve civic problems in more effective ways than our current leaders and our current heads of state and CEOs.

When we learned about the potential of web3 to solve civic problems, we saw that not very many young people were being onboard the impact side of web3. We thought who would be better at training and onboarding young people than an organization that is already focused on just that but for civic innovation more broadly.

So in the early days for me, I didn't know anything about web3 at all. We had our founder Gary Sheng of Civics Unplugged. Gary had some familiarity with web3. We also brought in people from our network who did know how DAOs and NFTs work.

I remember the first days of being in a room with people just like having brainstorming sessions and someone who we brought in was like, “if at any point you don't understand something, just stop. And I'll explain.”
And I was like, “I can't stop you because I would have to stop you after every single word that you said, because I don't understand anything that you're saying at all.”

So I really learned about web3 through conversations and the process of just building the DAO. That's kind of a philosophy that we took for onboarding the rest of the young members.

We think that the best way for people to learn about the power of web3 and the power of DAOs is to just build one and help lead one.

All of our working groups, which if you don’t know what working groups are - it's kind of what they sound like. These are groups within the DAO that decentralizes workflows. To accomplish something within a DAO it's done by working groups that have different focus areas. And so those are all led by young community members from all over the world.

Why did Dream DAO choose NFT for governance over the ERC20 token which is more of a thing?

The primary reason why we use the NFT was as an onboarding mechanism.

So we have two types of members. We have what we call our builders, who are 15 to 20-year-olds who are learning about web3. And we have the champions who are the mentors that are helping teach them about web3.

The way that you become a champion is by purchasing one of our NFTs and for every NFT that is bought by a champion, an NFT is given to a builder for free.

So by joining the Dream DAO, the young fellows (builders) gain an asset, like an asset that is worth something, and get their first experience. It’s kind of their membership to the Dream DAO. It’s like the give one, get one model, which I think is really powerful in itself.

Voting is really complicated as we know. Especially when creating a DAO where you're onboarding diverse young people who really don't have any capital. A traditional token model of like the most tokens equating to the highest weighted vote, just doesn't make sense at all.

We're still working to develop a merit-based voting system. It's a huge question within the entire web3 and DAO ecosystem. And we don't know the answer.

That's one of the big focus for our second season, which will start on July 2nd, 2022.

How do we create a merit system that rewards people for participation but also allows people with the most context to make the most informed decisions?

Did you seek any advice on structuring the DAO? Also NFTs over tokens for governance, whose idea was it?

There are multiple answers to that. Umm, there are probably three answers.

The first is that Gary originally got the idea for Dream DAO because he talked to Scott from Gitcoin and he was telling Scott about the work that we do at Civics Unplugged. And he was like, “wouldn't it be cool if you created a web3 version of this.” He kind of introduced the concept of a DAO.

The second is I told you we had those people come and we had brainstorming sessions before the DAO was even created with people like Gary and myself.

And we were asking questions that we didn't really know the answer to like, “oh so should everything be on-chain. Right. And they were like, “eh, not really.” And that group taught us the fundamentals.

And then number three would be that it's a constant evolution of the design of the DAO.

It's constantly being co-designed and co-evolved by the members. Both the builders, the young people, and the mentors.

I think we're actually really lucky and really unique in the fact that not every proposal passes in the Dream DAO. We had a proposal that went out this weekend that didn't pass. Like I think only two people voted yes. And the proposal was on how we deal with our alumni.

People are actually reading into it and they vote and they voted no. And I think a lot of times in DAOs people just vote yes. Or like don't take the time to fully dive into it.

So I guess my answer is Scott helped us come up with the idea that Dream DAO could even exist. Those early conversations with people like David Silverman helped us gain a foundational knowledge of what DAOs are and how they operate. And then it's a continued story with our members, continuing to figure out what systems need to exist and how we improve our existing systems

Is there a voting threshold before decisions are passed?

Yes. So we have 80 voters in a quorum, I think it is 12 votes.

How many builders do you have - the Gen Zs of this program? And what countries do they come from?

We have 40 builders. All our builders, most of them are the alumni of Civics Unplugged fellowship. The Civics Unplugged Fellowship is 74% young women, 70% people of color, and represents over 70 countries.

I don't have specific data on how many countries are represented within the Dream DAO, but it comes from a community of 70 plus people.

We have our governance working group led by an 18-year-old from Russia. We have lots of Indian representation. Brazil, Italy, Germany and lots of different places.

What about the Champions, the ones mentoring the students? Which countries do they come from?

They are mostly from the US.

And I assume the Champions have expertise in web3. Also I’m really impressed with Dream DAO. I have had conversations with your builders and I love what they’ve shared with me about hands-on learning, exposure to this new world, and being part of a community. I feel like you should increase your capacity, the number of fellows you can accommodate should be expanded.

You launched Dream DAO in December 2021, right?

Yes

What’s your current relationship with Civics Unplugged, the nonprofit from which you sprung out? Are you co-opted within the nonprofit like do you have a board of directors watching over your DAO operations, bank accounts, etc?

I’d love to understand this relationship because I feel like a lot of nonprofits will go down this route, they’ll have a formal nonprofit structure with DAO as an operating model.

The relationship with Civics Unplugged, the best way to think about it is like it's the parent organization. The main thing that came from Civics Unplugged is the people who started Dream DAO. Those people worked at Civics Unplugged and the community of people who are in the Dream DAO is alumni or friends of Civics Unplugged.

Initially, it was funding too. The fact that some of the employees like myself and Gary who were spending their time on Dream DAO were getting their salaries from the nonprofit.

But now Dream DAO is at a place where we are financially sustainable.

The way that the nonprofit comes in is that sometimes we have to use USD to pay for things. So we have to send crypto from our wallet. Sometimes it's very hard to pay young people from around the world in crypto because they can't convert it back to their local currencies.

We need to use the nonprofit treasury to send people money. Then in terms of people who are full-time employed by Civics Unplugged, legally, they have to have their salary covered by Dream DAO because of legal considerations. For example, if I spend 70% of my time on Dream DAO, the Dream DAO has to reimburse Civics Unplugged for the equivalent 70% of my salary because of how much time is spent on it.

How about fundraising, what are your sources?

The fundraising model is a mixture of NFTs and grants. We raised 150,000 I think to get the DAO started off from our NFT collection. We've also been supported by Coinbase, Celo, Near, and a couple other places since then in the form of grants.

Fundraising is going to continue being a mixture of NFTs and grants, and then maybe a couple small things. Like a lot of people in the DAO want to start a merch store. So maybe we'll sell a little bit of merch. I don't think that'll be a huge profit-making thing though.

How are you internally organized and how do you recognize the team for their contribution?

The model for working groups is we have a working group leader who is a young person that would be like a 15 to 20-year-old. Who is learning web3. And then we have an advisor who is one of the mentors and they kind of form a tag team leading the working group.

Each working group has its own budget and they allocate and decide what key results they're going to have for the season. For instance, in the governance workstream, one of their season’s results is to create a merit voting system. And so they’ll have their budget and they can create bounties based on these key results to have certain working group members contribute.

The baseline we use is $20 an hour. So it's like if a task is gonna take two hours and two people do it, the collective value would be like $80 to create something. And then the working group leads themselves are paid $750 a month just as a baseline for what they do.

The working groups meet every week. They do some behind-the-scenes coordination and things like that. And they might help out on other tasks.

What are the different kinds of tech tools you use in your everyday DAO work?

We use Discord for communication, which I don't really like, but we use it. We use email. The way that we use email is for important information. So every Monday we send out every idea that's floating around in the DAO like maybe we should send this person to a conference. So we document these ideas in an email every Monday.

Then people have a week till Friday to give feedback on those ideas and the ones that people are kind of happy with those ideas get turned into proposals, and those proposals get on the snapshot for voting.

We're also starting on season two using Clarity, which is a bounty management system. In the past, we’ve also been using Notion for a lot of our documentation. And I think we will continue to use Notion as well. We might move on to Clarity for some of that. If people become comfortable with the tool because it does allow you to do documentation.

The reason why we don’t have a ton of tooling is that it doesn't make sense to use tooling until you have laid a foundation for your DAO. Tools are supposed to level up the work that you do.

If you don't even have a foundation of the things that you're doing, tooling doesn't even really make sense, like it's meant to improve what you're doing.

I so agree with you on mindful tooling. We’ve formed a DAO to study Impact DAOs and our approach to tooling is minimalistic and easy to use with zero learning curve possibly. Like we had to make a choice between Google Docs and Notion and we decided to go with Google Docs since everyone has Gmail and is familiar with that feature.

Ok moving to safety and security, how do you keep your operations safe online as you know we are in crypto and crypto always attracts some bad characters.

So this is where the mentors come in. The mentors have these things called learning together sessions, where we invite people who are like leaders in web3 to talk about different topics. That's our primary method of educating our members. And sometimes it's the mentors within the DAO who do it.

And I think a good example of this is we had a session at the beginning. We'll have it again. When we onboard new members, we do a wallet setup session. So one of our mentors showed everyone how to set up a wallet and then told them all of the security concerns and like different ways to save their passwords and things like that.

The mentors are really good people for sharing best practices and caution.

That said we did have someone who lost access to their wallet and they no longer had access to their NFT for the Dream DAO. So they couldn't vote on things. And this is after a lot of caution as well.

When you're working with humans and especially young people there are a lot more considerations and it's not as simple as just teaching people. I think that you're gonna have things like that come up. And so, like, we haven't thought of a great process for that because I don't really know what you can do.

Like we sent her another NFT. But yeah, there are definitely some considerations. I think the best thing we can do is have the mentors share their best practices along the way.

How do you measure impact? Do you have any measurement criteria?

Let me try and find something for you on impact. Wait if I leave Riverside on my phone. Wait, can you hear me still? Yeah, I can hear you. Don't leave Riverside.fm, Can you hear me now? Yeah! I was trying to find, we posted on Twitter, our season two metrics. So I was trying to look there, but I couldn't leave and actually still talk.

Our three primary things that we're looking for in season two are members onboarded. So we're going to be onboarding at least 30 new young people to the impact side of web3.

We want to match 20 more people with internships. And 20 more young people to conferences all around the world. And that's our metrics starting from July 1st to the end of November.

We primarily are about educating young people. Giving them hands-on experience with internships and the people who wanna go even further, giving them a completely immersive experience into web3 by learning and going to conferences.

I mean, I’ve already spoken to two of your builders Joshua from Mexico and Madhav from India. They were so lit about Dream DAO and how it’s changed their lives by taking them into the future. I can see the impact.

You are also pretty young, aren’t you 19? Who coaches you?

Yeah, I’m 19. And in terms of coaching me, it’s definitely Gary. I have learned so much from Gary and Civics Unplugged as a whole. Like Civics Unplugged when they were created, had the motto, “kids will lead.” That's really the approach that they take.

I think that people are often capable of so much more than they think they are. And then that other people think that they are.

I started by doing small things for Civics Unplugged and then they slowly trusted me and gave me to do bigger things. And yeah, I mean, just getting to continually grow.

I think I just was lucky to have found a community and an organization like Civics Unplugged hired me out of high school to take a gap year and work full time for them in New York.

And they took a chance on me. I've already grown so much and I'm actually doing a second year with them as well, started like a month ago and just like getting the opportunities to try things out and to fail and to use my creativity and skills. Just like overall, very lucky to have had those opportunities.

I wish every young person can get an opportunity as you’ve got. Hands-on learning and project-based learning is the best form of learning. Your organization is so needed at a much larger scale. I hope you can expand.

On a side note is this your full-time job?

Yeah. So Dream DAO and Civics Unplugged are definitely my focus. What's been cool about web3 is that you have the freedom to try out different things. For example, at Gitcoin, which is all about funding digital public goods, I have something called the public goods library, which is like a weekly discussion call that I get to moderate every week where we bring in experts. Similar to the Dream DAO learning together series we bring in people to talk about web3 and the ideas behind public goods and how we can fund more public goods. So that's kind of a fun thing for me to do every week is to facilitate that conversation and actually that helps with my work.

I meet people through those calls that can help out with Dream DAO, and I've actually found people who've become official mentors of Dream DAO via connecting through those weekly calls.

Any DAO that you look up for inspiration and then what have your learnings and challenges been in this space?

It's a big question about how and if we scale. I think that a lot of DAOs start off really big because they just blindly follow the metric of how many people are in the DAO.

And oftentimes if you have larger communities, you have much lighter touch points with each individual and you might not actually be able to have a deeper, more profound impact.

If you have a smaller group of people, for example, like the way that Dream DAO operates now, we have about 40 young people. But every one of those young people, if they contribute, can probably get an internship. They can probably go to a conference. Like our internal community is not necessarily fighting for a very limited number of resources. We have the number of resources we need for the members of our community.

So that's a huge advantage of being small. But to reach more young people, it's just the question of you having to substantially scale the resources we have. And then you get into questions of like, even if you did have the resources, how would the community itself be affected?

How about inspiration? Who do you look up to?

For inspiration, um, I think, um. So there's this Thiel Fellowship, which you may have heard of. It's basically a program where they pay young people to drop out of school for two years and they give them $100,000 to work on a project. I think that there are a lot of ways to improve that model, but I do think the general idea of giving young people the support to build something even if it's outside of school is really appealing.

I would like us to find a way in the future to maybe fund a couple of projects out of Dream DAO. I don't want people to have to create something. We can help train the people who turn a lot of these visions into reality.

Sometimes that's harder than actually coming up with the ideas, like making the idea reality.

But that said if there are people who do come up with really innovative and revolutionary ideas that level up the way that this ecosystem is then we should find a way to help fund that work and find a way to help them get started and make it a reality.

Do you know that Vitalik Buterin the founder of Ethereum is a Thiel Fellow? He was awarded a two-year $100k fellowship when he was 20 years old to work on his passion projects then.

What, no, really. Wow, I didn’t know that.♦️

🎙 Madison was interviewed on June 28th, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project. She moved from Oklahoma to NYC to work full-time for Civics Unplugged and now with Dream DAO.

We’d like to 🙏 Gregory Stock of Secret Sauce NYC based design firm that’s helping us articulate our brand story and media assets (soon to come). Their services are pro bono and we are very grateful for that.

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or join our Discord.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Kris on the Evolution of Gitcoin DAO

Deepa — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 12:35:02 GMT

Kris with his partner and fellow DAOist Guil. The french writing on the wall says, “power does not protect, it protects itself.”

I interviewed Kris, Operations Co-lead of Gitcoin DAO to understand the scale of the organization and the processes. I was also interested in learning from Kris about the transition phase of Gitcoin, moving the company founded in 2017 into a DAO in 2021.

Kris also has a lot of experience working with other DAOs. Before joining Gitcoin in July 2021 he was previously part of Giveth, Commons Stack, and Aragon DAC.

We also dig into cool facts about how Gitcoin sustains its giant operations and how it manages a team of 150+ contributors.

Interviewed and edited by me. Transcribed and written by my DAO mate Ashish

I'd love to know about your DAO journey. How did you get into the DAO world and which year?

I started on this journey in 2017 when a friend of mine just invited me into a project called swarm city. So that was like a decentralized, commerce platform. And that's where I learned about Ethereum and blockchain and all the things.

That was my first non-traditionally organized company. And then from this, I went to Giveth and then to Commons Stack.

Gitcoin is my first official DAO, but all the others were also non-traditional organizations. This is the summary of how I got into this.

Which year was this, when you first started with the DAO?

That was in 2017.

Wow! You've been here for a long time. You must have seen a lot. I think we can do a whole episode on that.

The whole, yeah. A lot has evolved.

So moving back to Gitcoin, were you there when they transitioned into a DAO?

I was in talks with them, like in March or April last year to join Gitcoin. And then, on May 25th, they announced the DAO. I joined them in July. So it was a little bit after the launch of Gitcoin DAO.

Got it. Who did you meet? What got you to join Gitcoin? If you can share a bit more about it.

Totally. So, before this, I worked at Giveth and at Commons Stack, and they are very value-aligned web3 projects.

Giveth is like a decentralized donation platform. Commons Stack is all about public goods and is about building communities around currency. Both of these organizations are deeply aligned with Gitcoin.

I already knew Kevin and Scott, and at some point, we just started chatting.

It all started when I decided to take a break from the Commons Stack, to do a bit of a mental health pause. It was at that time that Scott reached out to me to have a chat.

And that was when I told him I'm actually slowly starting to look for a new opportunity and he was like, “we are looking for someone like you at Gitcoin.” That's how I joined.

Nice. And what was your first task?

My original role was to be responsible for community experience, which is a very large and wide topic.

It was primarily to make sure that whoever joins our DAO, through Notion or Discord or other means, could find their way around and not get overwhelmed with the massive amount of information that is available.

My role was to help structure that, organize things, welcome people and set up processes to make sure that we could easily onboard people into our DAO.

And also for people once they are contributors, they can be as efficient as possible.

Were you bringing people from different places onto a common platform, say Discord where you were then onboarding them? What was the common meeting place?

Discord was mostly the meeting place. That's where most come in. People find us because of a talk or something, and then they join us in Discord. Sometimes they go to gitcoin.co and then they're like, I want to contribute, but I don't know how. That's the first step.

And then from there, what I set up for example was biweekly onboarding calls where people could actually talk to us.

At that time, did Kevin and Scott share any thought processes around how they plan to transition?

When I joined, there was not a lot of DAO-wide structure just yet. We had a Discord and we had workstreams and every workstream was doing its own thing.

I like structures and designing organizations is my favorite thing. So, I had a lot of thoughts and opinions on this.

I had a lot of conversations with the team to see how we can improve and have the project thrive. I was deeply involved in all of the changes.

How many people are in the core team? Did all of the company join the DAO or did you build the DAO team from scratch?

Initially, we didn't have a good overview on how many people we were paying in the DAO, nor did we have a good view on how many were still in the company.

Within the DAO, it was anywhere between like 50 and 200 people who were contributing to the different workstreams.

We were organized in workstreams. And different workstreams had different definitions like, what is a contributor? Some groups just had contributors who were not getting paid at all.

What was the first aspect of the company that was decentralized?

To my knowledge, I would say the first thing that really started to kick off and did well was FDD, which is Fraud Detection and Defense.

That's like everything that has to do with anti-Sybil defense, for people really attacking the system.

I think we started with several workstreams simultaneously, but FDD was super quickly organized.

Another one that started was, MMM, which stands for Memes, Merch, and Marketing. That's like more of a communication side of things. This was also very much a bottom-up workstream.

Another workstream was dGrants, a decentralized version of the grants. That was an experiment that actually failed. They had a team and they did not deliver. These are the three big ones that come to mind.

Did you’ll get any external help? Any consultants or any other DAOs that you looked at for inspiration or was it just figuring out everything yourself?

It depends. There were a lot of people coming in with advice and best practices from other DAOs. But I think we mostly just figured it out ourselves.

In the workstream structure for example everyone did it a little bit independently by themselves, and then slowly after a while more processes across the workstreams emerged.

My role was then evolving. Initially, it was a community experience, and then I was to operate the DAO as a whole.

Then we started to organize a little bit more, like how we can work across the workstreams and what are some of the things that we can manage together.

Some of these things were like, we need some accounting, best practices, people operations, support, tooling for example. So these are the things that came under DAO operations.

Got it. Is Gitcoin 100% DAO now?

Yes. We still have the company, but the only thing that is still in the company is something that we call hackathons, bounties, and events.

Gitcoin’s core activities are entirely in the DAO.

The latest and final workstream that came into the DAO three months ago is the entire product team. They now officially received their first budget from the DAO.

They, on one hand, continue to maintain the current version of the grants and they're also building grant 2.0, a decentralized protocol.

What were the tools used then, a year ago? Also what made Gitcoin on-chain.

When it comes to decision-making, the tools are Discourse, a forum on which we have proposals. Then once we have enough people responding, it goes to snapshot. And the last one is Tally.

Tally has no practical use. It actually just moves the funds from our treasury to specific multisig for the workstreams.

Mostly we make decisions on the forum and snapshot.

So, the tools have remained the same over the past one year.

I am a minimalist in all forms of my life including digital. I don't like adding too many tools - minimize, minimize, minimize is my philosophy.

And it's really nice to see that a big organization like yours is a minimalist as well.

Yes. We are trying to be.

So yeah, moving on. What's your current role?

Right now, I'm responsible for the DAO Operations together with my colleague Jodi.

That's having an oversight of all the things like customer support and community experience. Community experience consists of everything that has to do with tooling, and also community management.

We also call it CSDO. It is everything that has to do with cross-stream DAO operations. My role is also to facilitate meetings to bring all workstreams together.

The last ones are accounting and people operations.

So People Ops is under DAO operations? Is it like a pod under the workstream? Do you have a term for it?

We call them initiatives. Also there, I believe in minimalism and I try to keep it as simple as possible.

We have the DAO, we have workstreams and we have initiatives and that's it.

How does Gitcoin sustain its operations? Are there any revenue streams? I've interacted with Gitcoin grants, so I completely understand how that works. Gitcoin is like a philanthropic platform-based company. Right?

How do you sustain your operations? As you give out 100% of the funds raised on Gitcoin?

So, we don't get it from outside at all.

We take zero percentage or nothing on any transaction. We fund ourselves through our treasury, which is basically GTC tokens.

People attribute value to the GTC token and we give governance rights to our contributors.

There is a free market where some people just exchange tokens for USD or others. So we sustain ourselves through that treasury of GTC tokens that has value because the market gives value.

That's amazing. It's so amazing because you own your fundraising. Like it never existed, but it exists now and you don't have to go begging, asking people to support your operations.

In the nonprofit space I come from people are always begging to get their operations funded, or they take a 15% cut from funds raised for projects. But I love that you transfer 100% of the funds to the projects. And then you have this tokenomics that sustains your operations!

How did you design tokenomics? And how did you kickstart your economy? If you can share some details it will be great.

Yeah. That's exactly how it happened.

We created the GTC token, then through an airdrop, we delegated the tokens to stewards. So that’s how it started. People got an airdrop and people started buying the token and the token has value. It was pretty simple in that sense.

And how many tokens were issued, like who did the designing? Because it feels like that's a skill? Whose idea was it basically?

I think it was for a big part Kevin Owocki himself.

He's great at these things, but we also learned from the already designed smart contracts from previous airdrops. Honestly, I don't know exactly which one, but I could find that information for you.

We took what already existed. We forked it and made it better. I wouldn't claim that Gitcoin built everything from scratch because I'm not 100% sure that is the case.

Who is considered a contributor at Gitcoin? And then if I just want to take part in governance, can I buy a GTC token and participate?

Yeah. So that last one you can always do. If you buy or get GTC tokens, you get a say in any future decisions that we make at Gitcoin.

How do we define contributors in general? If we narrow it down, we have different levels.

We have this one new term called DAO citizens. So, anyone who joins our discord and just gives a brief introduction of themselves gets a label and that's a DAO citizen.

With DAO citizens, you get access to some of the workstreams and chats where you can just lurk and ask questions. This is the first level.

Once you're a DAO citizen, you can become a DAO contributor. A DAO contributor can be a steward in the sense that you represent other people and that you have other people delegated to you. So that's one level of contributing. And it's a very important one.

Another one is that you find bounties that we put out or you join part-time any of the initiatives that we have and you start getting rewarded for your work. And once that happens, you become a part-time contributor.

If from discord logic you get several tags assigned, you get access to more granular levels of the organization. Now you're in a workstream. Now you're in a specific initiative in that workstream and you join the chat and conversation in the meetings.

So, it goes from, being a citizen, you go to trusted, you go to a part-time contributor to a full-time contributor. That's it actually.

How many of the contributors are paid - full-time or part-time in your organization? Would you have any number?

That's a great question.

I can actually tell you the exact number because we have a role and that makes it easy.

That is, everyone who works more than 30 hours has this role. 84 people work more than 30 hours in the DAO. That’s the core and the role is also called DAOcore.

And then, if you count everyone who's like about half time, that's probably closer to 120 or 140 maybe.

Got it. I have interacted with a couple of customer support folks during my grant round. I was the most active ticket opener. For any questions, I would go and open a ticket. And it has been great interacting with them.

I was just telling somebody the other day about traditional organizations and DAOs. I was like, “listen I've never come across such good customer service anywhere else."

The customer support people that I've interacted with at Gitcoin have been super amazing. They respond like within five minutes and then very quickly they'll send me a survey to complete as well.

I want to actually break a lot of these perceptions that people have about DAOs, like those who think that DAOs are messy, slow and work doesn’t get done. For me, this customer service part in Gitcoin was super-efficient.

So, moving on, in terms of best practices, what do you think are the best practices of Gitcoin DAO that you’d like to share?

I would say, first of all, Keep it Simple.

A lot of my role is just cutting down on complexity and always asking, “What does this solve?” Is it really solving a need that we have. If not, let's put it on pause.

The second one is to have a clear Mission and Act towards that mission. If you have not agreed upon what you actually wanna achieve, you probably won’t achieve anything.

For this, we use this structure called A Purpose and Essential Intents. We have received it from this consultancy firm, The Ready.

It's a process that you go through to say, this is a purpose that we all align around and there are several key essential intents of what we then want to do.

Having that written out was so helpful because, before that, it was very difficult to actually assess if a workstream needed to be funded because it was like, yeah, it's great that you're doing this, I don't want to stop you, but is it what we want to fund?

Another best practice that comes up for me is Good and Efficient Organizational Structures, which are combined with ease of internal communication.

The thing that helped us a lot was the CSDO, the cross-stream DAO operations meetings and chat. It was quite the struggle to limit access to these meetings, but it helps a lot with the focus. Only two people per workstream can access it.

It rubs some people the wrong way because they think this is very exclusionary. Yes, it is, and that's because we need to make decisions.

If you have 100 people in a meeting, you cannot make decisions. You just have to be realistic.

For decision-making among our contributors, we use the Holocratic decision-making process, where you make integrative decision making together and people can object to a decision and you have reaction rounds.

For another decision-making method, we have a format where we try to work async as much as possible, and then when we have calls together, they are always outcome-focused.

We then have outcomes, next steps, action items, etc. In a way, it looks very corporate to some people, but it is very efficient. It is again provided to us by The Ready.

Got it. What about training, just so that everybody can fit into the mindset that you're describing? People have different work styles.

Totally. So we have multiple levels of training for embedding them in the way that we work.

We have a weekly meeting called, Gitcoin gathering. This is a meeting for all the contributors including core contributors, where we share how we do certain things within different workstreams of the DAO. So that other workstreams can also learn.

We have someone responsible for DAO tooling. He gives training to new joiners, like how to use Notion and so on. We have different people giving different levels of coaching.

For people who are newly onboarded, we have an onboarding template. They get a checklist to make sure they have the right roles, access to their email addresses, and the document on the mission or purpose and intent.

Yeah. I remember when I was with a company, a tech company based out of SF, I went for the new hire orientation, just like every other new employee. I was living in Singapore then, and they flew me from Singapore to SF for that. I was like WOW this New Hire Orientation must be a very imp thing for them to spend so much money.

And also when I joined the company they gave me all these books to read that the founder had written on his thoughts on philanthropy and cloud technology.

Do you give your contributors any books, so they can absorb the philosophy of your way of doing things? Do you have a recommended book list?

Yeah, so we have several things that we send to them. I can send those to you as well.

We send an onboarding checklist that has links to certain articles. It's not like books or anything. It's more like posts on our governance forum.

For example, one is TLDR- What is Gitcoin? It’s like a big overview. Another one is, how are we organized? What is our structure? And then there's a piece on web3.

Another one is on Grants 2.0, for example, that's our roadmap, where are we going?

So yeah, there's like several articles. Depending on your level, if you like to read things, then you know, all you need to know.

Got it. So you don't have a virtual new hire orientation? You said you initially used to do the biweekly onboarding calls and stuff. Do you still do that?

We still have them. But we have rebranded them a little bit to our DAO citizens call because we're not super actively hiring right now, unfortunately, because of a bit of a bear market.

We also have to be very careful and mindful of how we spend our funds. But, yeah, we still do those onboarding calls.

It seems like you’re doing a lot at Gitcoin DAO, looking after everyone, thinking, planning, making sure everybody is happy, and working efficiently! It’s a big role. How many contributors do you have in total?

That is a very good question. If I look at DAO citizens right now, we have 475 people in that role. So, that’s a big group. It's one of the many things I wanna figure out better. The DAO citizens are just like Gitcoin enthusiasts who have taken some time to really dive in, while some have really applied for roles.

If I look at DAO contributors right now, 370 people have that role, but it's not the right number, to be honest.

Active contributors are somewhere between 100-150.

If you look at it traditionally, I guess we're 150 people who are on our payroll.

That's a big organization. As a DAO, I feel like you must be the largest.

We're one of the biggest.

It's fascinating. I'm very conscious of the time. I know I've taken a lot of your time, but I feel there's so much to learn from you. Thanks for the great chat. ♦️

🎙 Kris was interviewed on July 25th, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project.

Kris conducting a workshop at the DAOist event in Lisbon, Portugal

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or join our Discord.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ukraine DAO Founder Spills the Truth on DAOs

Deepa — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 01:21:06 GMT

Alona Shevchenko, Co-founder and Operational Lead of Ukraine DAO at ETH Barcelona, July 2022

This is a very special interview for me with Alona, the co-founder of Ukraine DAO. I saw the making of Ukraine DAO from the very beginning on Twitter when they first popped up on Feb 24th, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Seeing how quickly they organized and fundraised got me thinking on how DAOs are an excellent model for organizing around causes.

I was impressed to see how quickly Ukraine DAO came together. They set-up all the essentials for fundraising online using the power of web3 tools and community. The fundraising was entirely in crypto and they raised $7 million in five days from over 3000 people on the internet. That was just WOW for me. I’ve been in the social good space for over a decade and have never come across this kind of speed and scale.

I documented their campaign about a month after their live unfolding on Twitter - Deep Dive Into Ukraine DAO - A Model for Future Nonprofits

So I’m very grateful that I got to speak to Alona, the co-founder and operational lead of Ukraine DAO to get first hand information from her.

DC: I'll start by asking how are you feeling. It must be exhausting and painful to see what’s happening with your country?

Alona: Yeah, I'm gonna turn on my camera to say, “hello”. I'm walking my dog Sasha. So it would be easier for me if I have the video off.

Yeah, it's been difficult but I realize humans are very adaptable creatures and I'm trying to adapt as well. I think I'm coping well.

Could you do a quick intro about yourself because I barely know anything about you.

DC: Sure. I’m Deepa and I got into crypto last year around May 2021. It was around the time when COVID was crazy in India and some Indian crypto folks on Twitter set up a fund and started fundraising in crypto. Vitalik Buterin donated like a billion dollars to that fund and that really got me interested into seeing how crypto is actually making a real life impact. Like this magical internet money, created out of thin air can actually buy oxygen cylinders and save lives. I wrote about my journey into crypto and I’ll share that article with you.

That event really got me into crypto and I started looking at crypto from the social impact lens. ... With Ukraine, I saw the same thing happen again.

Alona: Yes

DC: I noticed how quickly you all organized and raised $7M in crypto in 5 days? I started tracking your campaign from day 1.

Alona: It was founded on the 21st of February. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24th so a couple days before the invasion.

DC: Yeah I know, I actually went through your interviews and got to understand how you thought about it. Like how you reserved the Twitter handle, and then you spoke to a few people in the crypto community and they made introductions. So I learnt a lot just by going through your interviews and absorbing as much as I could from what's available publicly.

You didn't have to go through the trouble of opening bank accounts. You just opened a multisig, and then the whole internet community came together.

That's the power of web3 - the tools and the community coming together to make a significant impact.

Alona: Yeah. It's actually excellent timing with you today because I literally did a Twitter space today with Yuriy, he's Ukrainian. He is the lead of our translation and writing pod. Pods are working groups. It's like a short word for a working group.

And all the working groups that we have are in Telegram group chats. So we discussed moving the working groups to Discord so that the community can interact with them more and that they're not like close.

We are three co-founders - myself, Steve and Matt. And Matt is the guy from PleasrDAO.

I was alerted by my friend on the 19th of January who has connections with the Ukraine secret service that the invasion was very likely. I didn't think much of it because in Ukraine as part of Russian hybrid warfare there was always the next invasion date.

So I called my parents and I was like, “listen, I know you're not gonna do anything, but it's my duty to tell you this is what I've been told.”

They laughed at me and that was a completely normal reaction on their part because Ukrainians are so used to all these threats.

I wasn't a political activist as a career. I was a normal person. I was no one before the invasion on the 24th, nobody knew me at all. I had 400 followers on Twitter. I wasn't a known activist. There was not a single article about me ever in the media before.

Like you said it's amazing how the community can come together and can raise a lot of money in a short span of time.

To me, the most significant part of this whole story is social mobility for people who are really passionate about the cause.

To put it in context for you I was living a very low key lifestyle and I was really happy about it. I'm passionate about privacy and anonymity and the opportunities that blockchain provides with that. And so I was always very happy that I live my happy life.

But then I saw the amount of propaganda and the lies that were being published in mainstream media. I realized that not many people in the west are speaking up in favor of Ukraine and not that many people are telling the truth.

I first started in 2015 providing informal support to the revolution of dignity in Ukraine in 2015, but that's another story. So I had some experience with it and I was just constantly tweeting. And people were trusting me to deliver them credible information from way before the invasion.

And so this time when I went online I saw something was really off. Western countries don't usually start sending out diplomats back home when Russia is making threats. It's usually not what happens.

I'm usually a very stress resilient person, but watching all that unfold and no one is like reacting and doing enough to prevent this invasion. It was really scary.

And so something fascinating in my view happened on the 19th of February - four to five days before the invasion. I messaged the guy, Matt from PleasrDAO I just told you about, and I will show you the messages.

Like it's almost scary looking at them now.

He was the only person (Matt of Pleasr DAO) out of everyone I knew who could pull off what we did. And I had no idea when I messaged him. I had no idea that he was going to be able to do that.

On the 21st, I published that open letter. I don't know if you've come across it.

DC: No, I didn't read that.

Alona: Okay. So I never published an open letter in my life. Like I just never did. For some reason I published this through the Free Ross DAO blog.

I'm very grateful that FreeRoss DAO let me do it because it's quite a political thing. And I really appreciated that. They gave me that platform to publish it.

So it was published literally three days before the invasion. And then Matt of PleasrDAO retweeted the letter I published. So that’s how we got started.

As Ukraine DAO we are focusing right now on information support for Ukraine and providing credible information instead of it coming from the Russian propaganda.

DC: That's something I’d like to understand - what are your long term initiatives? I understand immediate fundraising was more towards immediate relief. But I'm sure as Ukraine DAO you must have thought of some long term strategy in terms of support for Ukraine.

Alona: That's the beauty of a DAO which is not possible with a traditional charity is that we adjust to Ukraine and to its needs immediately.

When there was one need for fundraising for the army, that was the biggest priority. That's what we were doing. These working groups that you see that I have sent you in a message - they are not equally active at the same time and they don't have to be.

So for example right now the priority is for information support. So the fact checking and media literacy group is the most important.

But at the same time the other groups are there. And so that means that when I need them, I go to them. For example, if I have IT problems I go there and I'm like, “Guys help me with this.” And someone volunteers to help us with that problem. And that's the case for pretty much everything.

DC: I also wanted to know in terms of contributors at the beginning and now. The numbers must have dropped. There must have been a rush in the beginning because it was in the heat of the moment. Very few from those days must be with you and new ones must have joined.

Alona: We have new people joining literally every other day. Like the team is growing super fast.

I select people very carefully into the organization. So not everyone is included.

DC: Is there an application process for contributors?

Alona: Yes. There is a contributor form.

First of all, I've contributed to DAOs for almost a year now. I have noticed certain things that make DAOs extremely inefficient and they are persistent across multiple different DAOs that I've seen.

That's why when I started Ukraine DAO, I kinda already knew what to avoid. One of those things was token-based governance.

Volatile tokens that when there is a bear market, everyone in the DAO is crying. I didn't feel like it was appropriate for our purpose at all. That's the first thing.

Second, I don't believe that in our case it's appropriate for anyone to be able to join the DAO as a contributor that would put us in danger for obvious reasons.

I've done a huge amount of research with the team on how to achieve organizational health.

So I can show you one of the draft docs, it's not updated, but it will give you a good understanding of the logic in developing this.

The key points are as follows.

The most important advantage that Ukraine DAO can achieve is organizational health and that applies to any group of people, any DAO, any kind of organization that wants to get something done. It's not specific to Ukraine DAO.

So what organizational health means is like minimal politics. And I don't mean international politics.

DC: Yeah I get it, you mean toxicity.

Alona: Yeah. And I try to keep it very light, we joke a lot and have fun together. It's a very different kind of fun not like how corporations try to do it.

DC: Yeah I know what you mean, the corporate types being forced and boring.

Alona: Ukraine DAO was started by a group of friends before anything. And it remains so even though we’ve completely grown.

The co-founders, they're not as active anymore, but they're very helpful. Steve, for example, the other co-founder, he's coming tomorrow to London to meet me with his wife and kids, which is amazing.

I've never met my co-founders before. We have a very good relationship, but they have three other jobs. So they cannot be hanging out with me all day.

With the new contributors I’m trying to develop a wholesome culture. We are all super supportive. We all really care about each other.

Minimal politics, minimal confusion. I try to communicate super clearly who we are, what we are about and how we are different from others DAOs.

High productivity with a DAO in the war time is hard but I think we are getting a lot of stuff done and low turnover. Except Nadia of Pussy Riot, nobody else has left.

Low turnover is something that I think is a good indicator of whether the team is toxic or not.

And so that brings us to the point of culture fit. That's the most important thing for us when we select a person. It's critical.

We have a fundamental page. On that page we spent an enormous amount of time writing up the core values because it's very important. The core values are something that makes the organization stand out from others.

I've seen so many projects they put absolutely generic, meaningless stuff in the documentation. That's something that we did in the beginning too. I wrote like decentralization, integrity, transparency bullshit.

DC: It's not from the heart, there is no thought behind it. Just copy and paste. Like even we are building a DAO to study Impact DAOs and I can totally relate to you. I’ve been listing our values in our Discord where we collaborate and there is a lot of thought behind each. There’s nothing corporatey - it gives a different vibe altogether.

Alona: The way you define values is you look at the leaders in the community. And you look at what are the traits about them that are pushing this project forward? That kind of stuff. The manifesto I shared with you there are some resources on how to define values.

First I wrote up these bullshit values. Because I didn't know what to put on the list. And then literally we ended up throwing away all those values and writing up our actual ones.

I'll have to go soon, but we can continue afterwards on Telegram text.

As an organization, in terms of governance, I don't want this DAO to do anything that Ukrainians would not want to do because this DAO is for them and not to make anyone feel good about themselves.

DC: Ok, no worries, I have a list of questions that I’ll send it to you. Do you prefer email or Telegram?

Alona: In a text on Telegram only. Email, I will never see it in my life.

DC: The questions would basically be best practices and learnings especially around organizing for relief. For instance yesterday, there was an earthquake in Afghanistan. And I feel like a lot of relief DAOs will come up immediately when you need immediate funds for immediate needs.

So what do you think are the best practices for those DAOs in terms of set up, fundraising, just basic minimum stuff to get rolling on the internet.

Alona: Sure I’ll make a note.

DC: Also your tips for staying safe - operational security.

Alona: Operational safety. Oh, I'm very glad you said it. I've got this document that was shared with me by one of our contributors, Sebastian. This document is applicable to most DAOs in terms of operational security. I'll send you the link.

We also have a very good online safety hub in Ukraine DAO. And it has cybersecurity tips for everyone, not just for DAOs like the general tips for an average user.

It also has communication resilience recommendations for people in the war zone. That's also something that can be helpful for people who are in areas where there is armed conflict of any kind.

This is all the stuff I put together. My cybersecurity firm who is helping me with my own personal cyber security scrutinized it.

They are one of the top guys in London. And so they have checked everything. I can vouch that the information is good to use. So that's pretty much operational security.

DC: How about your DAO tech stack?

Alona: Tech Stack, Ah!

It's funny because we barely use any web3 stuff.

Once I joined this Twitter space, it's about DAO contributor development.

People there were complaining about not having enough tools for collaboration. And I was like, what are you talking about? Like my position on it is if you cannot collaborate in a Google doc, no DAO tool is going to save you.

Ukraine DAO comes from a Telegram group chat. And a Google Doc.

Right now we are upgrading to Notion from Google Doc but that's it, and sometimes we still use Google Doc.

If you look at Ukraine DAO tools there is only one web3 product

That’s from Utopia Labs. That's helping us with treasury management. All the other stuff like Telegram, Notion, Asana, Google Docs, Substack for blog is web2. And so there is no web3 stuff apart from that one thing for multisig. That's all.

DC: That's great. I want to understand one more thing before you go. You’ve mentioned before that you don’t issue tokens and we also don't have any tokens. But then how do you track contribution? How do you vote and all that stuff, because people say you gotta have democratic voting.

Alona: Yes right we don’t have tokens. In terms of recognition we talk about each other. We give each other the spotlight.

I'm the only person who is paid by the DAO. That's the only thing that I do. And I work pretty much 24/7 every day.

As for contributors they are amazing.

We had a call with some other DAO leaders in the space to get their advice on how to run things. And they were like, “Guys how are you tracking your contribution?” And I was like, “we are not tracking them.” They're like, “what do you mean?”

“Then how are you compensating?”, they ask.

There are 150 people working on this stuff. And I'm like, I don't. They're doing it for Ukraine. And people have done incredible amounts of work consistently on a day to day basis because they get something out of it.

Something that money cannot give you and that's a sense of purpose.

A lot of people with high empathy are feeling helpless when they watch what's happening in Ukraine and they feel they cannot do anything. And they think financial donation is the only thing they can do. But maybe they don't have the money.

They come to us, they find us. And I also send you a fascinating audio of one of our team members.

He’s autistic and also has ADHD and he talks to me about it in this very moving audio. About how he's starting to realize that this work, being able to contribute to this DAO made his mental health situation much better.

I never thought about Ukraine DAO that way.

And he doesn't know anything about crypto that's another amazing thing about all this. He's not a web3 native person. He is a lonely soul who is really depressed. And he finds this group of people. He's very knowledgeable about Ukraine. He follows it very closely online, but he doesn't know how to help.

He finds us and we give him an opportunity to do something that's really meaningful. And he finds this community.

I almost cried when I listened to that. He's French, he's not even Ukrainian and our DAO work really gave him a new sense of purpose.

I've got to run now.

DC: Sure, I’ll follow-up on Telegram.♦️

I followed up with Alona on Telegram with few more questions.

Will you ever have a legal structure?

No we don’t and I don’t think we need it now.

Top learnings for starting a relief fundraiser?

Key recommendation from me - give selflessly loads to the cause you are passionate about before you start asking for help. Then people will see why you’re doing what you’re doing and they will help you. Even absolute strangers.

🎙 Alona was interviewed on June 23rd, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project. Prior to starting Ukraine DAO, Alona was on the core team of Free Ross DAO as well as contributing to other DAOs and web3 communities. Alona is originally from Dnipro region, Ukraine. She is currently based in London.

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or Discord.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

A Multi-DAO Contributor Shares Everything on DAOs

Deepa — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 12:43:05 GMT

There is a lot of talk around what DAOs are and how they function. Everyone has a different view. To get to the truth of the matter on DAOs I interviewed Saf a multi- DAO contributor. Saf is a full-time contributor at Gitcoin DAO and a volunteer with Dream DAO. He previously held roles at Bankless and Protein DAO.

How did you get into DAOs?

It was around May 2021, I started looking into web3 projects. I started with the big projects like Ethereum and Polygon and started degen investing into them. I read about Ethereum and what it does. I was learning about the technology that I was investing in. It just opened my eyes to a whole new world that I was really excited about all of a sudden. It showed me the potential that it had.

I think what got me most excited is the potential it had for solving coordination problems.

I've always been a people oriented person. I saw Ethereum and other blockchain technologies to be a very exciting technology that's helping solve coordination problems.

For the first 4-5months that I was in this space I was just reading, learning and lurking on Discords. Not really plugging in, just absorbing a lot of information. And then in November last year I actually started.

The first DAO I started contributing to was Bankless DAO. They're a media DAO.

I've always had an interest in writing even though I had no prior experience. Bankless has a writers guild and that's what I joined. I started writing articles for them. It was just super exciting to me because with no professional background in writing, I was able to write articles that were well received and I also got paid for them.

There's not a lot of opportunities like that in web2 where you can just show up as yourself.

At the DAOs there’s no kind of job description. It's like here's the DAO, this is the kind of stuff that we're doing. You plug in wherever you want, wherever your interests and your skills lie. And you really get to hone in on what your niche is. I spent so much of those first few months in DAOs just figuring out what I enjoy doing.

So I was writing for a little bit and that gave me a lot of energy but then I also want to be somewhere that aligns with my values.

In traditional web2 you would have to quit a job then go through the interview process. That's like super high friction. In web3, I could just be like, okay, I like part of this, but I don't like this particular thing about this organization. How about I do the same thing in this different organization and I just got to really fine-tune my interests and skills.

And it was just a really good self-discovery journey as well. So yes I started at Bankless DAO then I found some more value aligned DAOs. The first of which was Dream DAO.

Dream DAO is an amazing Impact DAO that trains and funds Gen Z civic innovators. I got involved with Dream DAO and through them I met a bunch of really cool people. I then ended up in Protein DAO.

In Protein DAO I was on the core team. Protein is a social impact web3 project. I helped run their accelerator program for a few months.

Now I'm full time in Gitcoin.

Gitcoin I think is like the most prolific regen web3 project. We help build and fund digital public goods.

What’s your role at Gitcoin DAO?

I do People Operations at Gitcoin. That basically entails doing HR related and community management stuff. I'm super excited about this space.

I quit my steady stable job at a university to go full time crypto and at a not so great time in the market. So obviously I really believe in it and I see a bright future for it.

You said you worked with Bankless initially and you got paid. Do DAOs pay in their token or in fiat?

It’s different for every DAO. Protein pays in USDC but Bankless pays in BANK token. At Gitcoin I get my salary in GTC. At Dream DAO I’m a volunteer so I don’t get paid anything.

What can you do with the BANK tokens? Do you get any rights over Bankless media, like in terms of having a say in matters. How does the token help?

Bankless is a governance token like a lot of other DAO governance tokens. So basically it represents ownership in the organization, like you can basically vote using your BANK tokens for the different proposals and stuff. I'm not super familiar with how Bankless governance works. I left before I really dived into that.

What does your typical day look like?

I plan my days at the beginning of the week. I write down what I need to get done for each DAO. Gitcoin is my full-time job.

With Dream DAO I love what they're doing. I play a champion role there where you're kind of mentoring bright Gen Z students. It's pretty hands-off for the most part. I occasionally check in and make sure that things are happening and give people a nudge. If anyone has any questions I answer them. So that doesn't take too much of my time, maybe like 5-10 hours a week with Dream DAO.

With Gitcoin because the work is so self directed you really have to plan your day well. At Gitcoin we use OKRs to plan for the work that needs to get done over the course of a season. A season is equivalent to a quarter.

At Gitcoin my work involves looking at the KPIs and to develop initiatives to meet those KPIs and then work on them with the People Ops team. A typical day can be quite varied. Like right now for the moment I'm working on a compensation framework. So it's a lot of research and writing. I spend a lot of the day writing out what this compensation framework for Gitcoin might look like. At the same time I'm also doing some community management stuff.

I like to split my days between what I'm going to do before and after lunch. Often when there is community stuff to do I try to focus on the comp stuff before lunch and then after lunch I switch my focus to community management.

It's required a lot of learning and iterating on my part to figure out how to do DAO work effectively. I don't think I'm still amazing at it. I think everyone kind of struggles with it. There's like constant attention pulls in all sorts of directions just because there's so much to do. It's very self-directed.

What are the various tools that are being used for team collaboration? Is it all on Discord or do you also use email?

We use Discord for communication primarily.

People don't use email very much. It's kind of seen as a web2, formal construct.

We use Google Calendar for planning and meetings. For documentation we use Notion - it's like a prettier version of Google Docs and has more functionality. We use Miro for collaboration. Miro is a tool we use frequently in all the DAOs that I'm part of. It's a digital whiteboard that allows people to collaborate effectively.

I'm just curious how often do you check in with each other? Like, do you have face-to-face meetings every day or once a week or a month?

At Dream DAO we don't have too many meetings. We mostly work asynchronously. There are meetings throughout the week but they're not mandatory to attend. They're usually hangouts and “learning together” sessions. They're not necessarily like work meetings.

At Gitcoin we have once a week, weekly workstream updates. This is where everyone, all the core contributors of the DAO, gets together and share updates from their own workstream.

Workstream is what we call our departments.

So there's that weekly workstream meeting. And I also have a one-on-one every week with the People Ops team and also with the community experience team because I'm also doing some community management.

So there are quite a few meetings throughout the week. For me, most of my meetings are concentrated on Wednesday and Thursday. Like Thursdays for example are full of meetings. So I can't get much else done other than meetings. But I think it's intentionally designed. So for example Mondays and Fridays, I don't have any meetings so I can just focus on deep work.

How does your work get recognized at different DAOs?

Protein and Gitcoin DAO are both established mature projects. For both of those organizations I get paid a salary and that's one way of recognition.

Dream DAO is completely volunteer work. We're hoping to add compensation as we get greater funding but so far it's entirely volunteer-based. I don't get paid for what I do at Dream DAO. Members express their appreciation through 🌮, where if someone does something that you appreciate you give them virtual tacos on Discord and there's a leaderboard of tacos.

So it's a fun way and I genuinely appreciate getting 🌮. It makes me feel good. Shows me that I'm doing things that are appreciated and valuable. That's kind of how we compensate or reward people in Dream DAO for now.

At Gitcoin we get paid. We also at the weekly workstream meetings express gratitudes towards different people.

I feel like the work is its own reward. In the sense that the work you're doing has a pretty big impact on these DAOs. And these DAOs have an impact on the world. So to me the work itself feels very rewarding.

Are DAOs leaderless or is there a leader?

That's a great question.

DAOs are purported as these kind of leaderless, flat organizations, and that's not always true, and it's not always a good thing to have an organization that's completely flat.

At Dream DAO our founder Gary Sheng was our de facto leader. He recently stepped down from his position to pursue another project. But Gary was kind of doing a lot of the direction setting.

A leader isn't the same as a boss. So there's definitely leaders in DAOs but no one really feels like they're my boss.

A leader is basically to provide a sense of accountability. Like they're kind of nudging you towards the OKRs at Gitcoin. They'll provide the resources and support when you need it. They'll generally make sure that the work stream or the DAO is headed in the direction that it needs to head and course correct.

It doesn't feel hierarchical.

What I'm learning through working at DAOs is it's possible to have leaders - people who take ownership and take responsibility for leading something while at the same time not letting it become a rigid hierarchy. That's kind of the structures of the current DAOs I'm in.

What does voting look like in the DAOs you are working at? DAOs are supposed to be democratic in their decision-making. And also does every matter come up for voting or is it only the top level matters?

It depends on the DAO. Each DAO has a slightly different governance style.

At Dream DAO we vote on a lot of things. Basically any change that needs to be made goes up to vote. I've expressed a few times that I think we like overdo it. Sometimes I think a lot of things that don't need to be voted on come up for voting and that slows down work and adds friction. But it's very democratic which obviously has its own merit.

Where as at Gitcoin the voting is very high level

Every quarter the DAO votes on budgets for each work stream. Work streams are like different departments. So each department every quarter will prepare a budget for what they need to get done for the next quarter. They will obviously create a compelling case for why their work is necessary, how much funding it needs etc etc. And then the DAO votes to approve those budgets or not.

Then these often lead to very lively discussions. Like just this past season we had one work stream that in the steward's opinion was asking too much money. And there were several rounds of negotiations and that work stream ended up cutting their proposed budget by I think almost 50% by the end of it.

Like those governance decisions can get quite lively.

So voting takes place for quarterly budgets and then after that it's basically the work stream contributors meeting and doing whatever it takes to reach the OKRs that were promised for the budget. There's no kind of unnecessary friction after that point.

Are they different voting styles used in the DAOs you are associated with? What platforms do you use to vote on decisions?

At Dream DAO we use NFTs as our voting token. In Dream DAO it's one person, one vote. It doesn't matter if you have like 10 NFTs it does not give you 10 votes. We use Snapshot for our voting at Dream DAO.

Gitcoin has a much more complex governance process because we're a mature DAO and have a lot more resources than Dream DAO. At Gitcoin we use delegated voting.

Delegated voting basically means that not every member of the community or every token holder has the time or the resources to participate actively in governance.

The governance tasks involve reading all the different kinds of governance proposals, being active in the governance forum and being very aware and on top of the matters.

What we do at Gitcoin is we delegate our tokens to someone in the community who is active and responsible and has expressed interest in participating actively in governance. We delegate our tokens to them.

Stewards are the people who are designated as these voting delegates.

We use steward health - kind of like report cards that basically gives you an overview of all the different kinds of stewards that we have.

The steward health cards will tell you how often is this person voting? Like, are they living up to their promise of being an active participant in governance. If the person you've delegated tokens to isn't participating then you can un-delegate your tokens and delegate them to someone else.

Also if they're not voting the way that you want them to, then you can delegate your tokens to someone else.

At Gitcoin in terms of tooling we have soft voting which is off-chain that uses Snapshot. That's kind of like where the initial vote happens. For workstream budget proposals “first approve vote” will happen on Snapshot. And then once the Snapshot vote is approved we'll do another vote on Tally which is like an on-chain voting tool.

The Tally vote is the autonomous part of the Gitcoin DAO where if the vote on tally passes then funds will flow from the Gitcoin DAO multisig to the work streams multisig autonomously.

I have a question about Dream DAO. You said 1 person 1 NFT 1 vote. So they issue NFTs to members. Can people then flip the NFTs? Like is it transferable?

NFTs are transferable. People can purchase NFTs on the OpenSea or mint NFTs. Yes they are transferable.

If I buy Dream DAO NFT on OpenSea then do I get to vote and have a say in their matters?

Absolutely. If you mint an NFT or if you buy one on the secondhand market that'll give you one vote in Dream DAO governance.

My next question is about safety. How do you stay safe online? What kind of measures do you take personally and as a DAO?

I don't do a lot of degen trading and that shields me from the crypto scams, and also that's where they generally tend to originate.

Scams are a huge problem in crypto and I try to stay safe by not clicking on any links that I don't recognize.

I don't participate in any centralized DeFi protocols which I'm super grateful for now, like with the stuff happening with Celsius. I haven't put any of my money in anything that's centralized and is subject to being locked up.

I obviously store my seed phrase somewhere safe and make sure not to share it with anyone.

For the DAO treasury management we use Gnosis multisig wallet. And that basically means for someone to take funds out of that it needs a signature from multiple people. We have like seven signatories and at least four of them have to sign to move funds out of the treasury.

So basically someone would have to hack four different people's computers which is quite unlikely and have them sign a transaction at the same time.

Do you have any advice for people who'd like to contribute to DAOs? Like what kind of mindset should they enter with? Especially since lots of people are coming from traditional organizations and are used to traditional working styles and DAOs are so radically different.

The biggest thing in this space is you really need to be very outspoken, very proactive and very self-directed to go anywhere in this space. There's often no direction and there's very little structure or organization in DAOs.

The people who thrive and do the best are the people who show up at a Discord and spend some time observing what's going on.

Like identify a need that the community has whether it's in their product or how the community is run or whether it's in governance or any other area that interests you. Just like proactively post and say, “Hey, I notice this thing needs to get done. I'm just gonna do it” Like you don't even ask - Hey, can I do it? It's like, I've done it.

And you do that with smaller things and that builds trust with the community and then people will start giving you more and more tasks and give you greater responsibility.

That's literally how I joined all the DAOs that I'm in right now in by just posting on the Discord and saying, "Hey, I love what you're all doing. I did this thing for free because you know I care about what you're doing.” And then people are like, oh, wow, well, thanks for doing this. And here's other stuff that needs to get done in this similar area.

So you just have to be really proactive, really outspoken.

You can't really be a shy person in a DAO right now. Not that there's anything wrong with being shy but like the way the space is structured right now you just have to be very comfortable with putting yourself out there.

It's very entrepreneurial, right? Nobody is telling you to finish this but you got to take the responsibility and finish it on time. Right? It's a different mindset you approach DAOs with. Do you have room for experimentation? Like can you run a side project that might greatly help the DAO?

There's room for experimentation within the OKRs for the season. Like within my own workstream for example with the compensation framework there's no set box that I need to fit that compensation in. So I can dream up a bunch of different things and experiment and propose them to my work stream and see if they're up for experimenting with them.

I’m creating that from scratch. So there's that type of flexibility. But outside of your OKRs I think the way that DAO work is structured, I don't think anyone will mind if you're doing something that's valuable to the DAO and it's not necessarily in your job description.

In fact, that's very appreciated and that'll give you greater recognition or clout in the DAO if you are creating things that are valuable.

So this just leads me to my next question. Do you have job descriptions? And do you get promoted? How does it work at Gitcoin since it's a mature organization and must be having processes in place?

Gitcoin the organization has been around since 2017. But the DAO is just a year old. So while we have good structures and processes in place from the past like from our centralized company which ran like any other tech company, the DAO itself and the whole decentralization part of it is only about a year old.

We're learning as we go. And that's a really good question, that's basically what I'm working on with this comp framework. It is giving people opportunities to level up.

Currently, we do have job descriptions at Gitcoin but honestly those job descriptions are super loose

Like for myself I definitely like the job description part I was hired for but it's not what I'm spending most of my time doing these days.

My role has just evolved and I've only been here over two months. We have role descriptions or job descriptions when we're hiring, but once that person is in, that really evolves on what that person's interests are and how they align with the needs of the DAO.

Great. Are there any promotions? Do you move up the ladder?

There are no promotions at the moment and that's something that we would like to get better at is to have some sort of a leveling matrix or like a leveling framework that gives people the opportunity to level up when they want to.

But for the moment there's no promotions. But what you can do obviously is take on more responsibility and if you feel like you're doing more work you can ask for a higher salary during the next budget round.

DAOs are not hierarchical, you don't necessarily ask your boss.

It's like you talk to your workstream leader about it. And if they find that this is obviously something that's important and valuable to the DAO then they'll ask for funding for it from the stewards in the next budget round. And if that gets approved then you get a higher salary.

So even promotions themselves are very self-directed if that makes sense.

Yes it does. Thank you so much Saf. You've shared a lot of information on how DAOs operate and are different from traditional organizations.

I 💯 agree they are different. I'm also living it every single day with my DAO studying Impact DAOs and we are building it up from scratch. ♦️

🎙 Saf was interviewed on June 21st, 2022 as part of the Impact DAOs research project. This is what he said about our project👇

I love the work you're doing with writing the book on Impact DAOs. I think there's definitely a need for aggregating all of this knowledge and a lot of the data that's kind of building around Impact DAOs.

If you have any questions reach out on Twitter or join our Discord.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

🗳 How we Picked the 12 Impact DAOs to Study

Deepa — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 03:33:37 GMT

Hi Folks,

For the next couple months I’ll be sharing tons of insightful information on DAOs. As part of the Impact DAOs research study, we’ve been having amazing conversations with DAO founders and contributors. We are learning a great deal about this new operating model and mindset needed to work in it. Below is how we identified the 10 DAOs for the research and our learnings through that selection process 👇

Our goal for the Impact DAOs study is to find 12 Impact DAOs and to study them intensively through conversations with the DAO builders themselves. Our aim to have an equal mix of social and climate DAOs.

We ourselves are also a DAO (so meta) and during our first couple weeks we analyzed several Impact DAOs to come up with our target list of 10.

We fixed three criteria around which we would evaluate:

Is it a DAO or just a web3 project? For instance if it’s a protocol not governed by a DAO we are not including them in this study.
The DAO needs to be an Impact DAO - a DAO whose core purpose is to help the people and the planet. We believe Impact DAOs are formed with different value systems and to guide future changemakers we need to understand the DNA of DAOs that are purpose driven.
They need to be operating as a DAO for at-least 5 months. We called them “meaty DAOs” so we have lots to study and learn from them

Initially we also had “impact” as one of the hard criteria but gradually we removed it as we learned that the space is very new (just a year old) and that for impact to be seen it takes time. Keeping this in mind we also included DAOs that have a potential or presents a model for future Impact DAOs

🗳 Selection Process

The process of selecting DAOs for our study led to some interesting findings

There are three emerging categories of Impact DAOs. Enablers (enabling impact either through funding or training) Social Impact (direct impact with people) and Climate (direct involvement with climate solutions)
This space is very new. Most Impact DAOs started in 2022 and many of those are just taking off. This makes the case of studying experienced Impact DAOs even stronger. The first Impact DAO could be traced back to 2020 and couple springing up in mid and late 2021.
Many web3 impact projects are planning on launching a DAO. They have existed as a blockchain project for long but now have plans to launch a DAO in order to govern their projects.
There are far more web3 climate projects as compared to social impact. However very few are governed by a DAO. Most are either transitioning into a DAO now or launching as DAO first or aspire to become a DAO. We’ve had a hard time finding the “meaty DAOs” in the climate space.

To help our DAO members make a selection for the study, a small team (of 3 members) made a list of Impact DAOs based on the set criteria described above. They then vetted the DAOs that made it to the list by looking at their Twitter, website, and Discords to evaluate how active they were, their story and values, theory of change, and their perceived impact or in some cases measurable impact.

Our entire team (DAO) was then presented with the list and were given 4 days to pick 5 DAOs in each of the 3 categories (Enabler, Social and Climate). We opted for a ranked choice method of voting (first being the most preferred). DAOs with the most votes made it to the study.

Our list of 12 DAOs

🚀 Gitcoin DAO
🚀 Dream DAO
🚀 Commons Stack
🌎 Impact Market DAO
🌎 Human DAO
🌎 Proof Of Humanity DAO
🌎 Good Dollar DAO
🇺🇦 Ukraine DAO (also a model for humanitarian aid)
🌳 Klima DAO
🌳 All for Climate DAO
🌳 Regen Network
🏙 Pact DAO, NYC City

We are having 3 interviews per DAO. Our interview based research methodology is working wonders. We are collecting rich insights into how DAOs operate and also the nuances and their back stories.

With 10+ conversations that we’ve had so far we’ve started to realize this book will not just be about Impact DAOs but also about the future of work and organizing. The scope of this book is far bigger than our original purpose.

#regen #ReFi \n\nthe 📗 is not just about crypto, it’s also about the #futureofwork + the future of organizing for a better 🌏 ","username":"deeparocks","name":"deepa (Impact DAOS research+book 🐇)","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jul 12 03:57:07 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"our vision for the Impact DAO book is this👇\n\nreplace \"software engineer\" with \"dao builder\" and read again 😉 https://t.co/kGrsdApjEQ","username":"deeparocks","name":"deepa (Impact DAOS research+book 🐇)"},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":0,"like_count":7,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">