Forum 2: 31st August 2023
Here's the documentation of our second Grassroots Governance Forum. You'll see top-level summaries for each breakout room here, with more detail in the relevant sub-page.
- The definition of a DAO isn’t clear-cut.
- Organisations sometimes say they are decentralised when they’re not, often because they are plutocratic.
- Perhaps “autonomous” is about how well the DAO can function without the core leadership stockpiling all the power?
- Look at the telos of DAOs - what is a DAO for? It’s about capture-resistance. A DAO tries to prevent people from capturing the organisation for their own purposes.
- It’s not about “top-down” OR “bottom-up” - it’s more about a flattening of the entire hierarchy.
- 1.See presentation (link coming soon)
- 2.DAOs shouldn’t limit themselves to one system - we have tools to do corporate, democratic, AND pluralistic. Different systems for different needs.
- 3.Maybe 1-coin-1-vote is fine to approve treasury txs - but there are a lot of other processes in decisionmaking and governance actions that don’t require this restriction.
- 4.If wealth is used to influence decisions, it should be done at a fair price.
- 5.Influence (the power that you have within the community) is not the same as the number of votes you have.
- 6.How can we get the wider population to adopt this approach? Perhaps by starting small, with groups using these approaches in their own teams.
- 1.See slides here. (Note: slides are by Felicien Foto Manfo and Mermoz Dzubhang, and are made available under a Creative Commons licence CC BY:NC:ND)
- 2.African tradition uses complex, fractal systems (a top-level grouping has a structure which is echoed by the smaller groupings that sit underneath it.)
- 3.Decision-makers / representatives can’t be people who know nothing about the issue being decided. Instead, representation is dynamic - decisions are made either based on knowledge (those closer to the criticality of an issue make the decision) or on interest (those who care about the issue decide it).
- 4.Your identity and culture are important. You can’t represent a group you don’t belong to; and to be someone’s representative, they have to know who you are. But possibly, a group rather than an individual could be a representative, to avoid individuals being personally exposed.
- 5.For decision-making in Cardano, we need to develop a culture of Cardano; but there can be subcultures within this - the fractal structure again. Strong subcultures know who they are and what they need, and can make consensus decisions more easily.
- 6.To determine who is knowledgeable,the time someone has committed to learning about an issue is important.
- 7.If Africa had continued its traditional decision-making and representation systems, and had not adopted Western norms, things would be better.
- 1.Decentralising isn’t easy! One person can’t manage it alone; multiple stakeholders makes it complex; people find it hard to give up their power.
- 2.It’s not just about tooling - the human and cultural factors are critical
- 3.When trying to decentralise, “ask the community!” is a recurring theme
- 4.There is a trade-off between the efficiency of centralised decision-making, and the ideal of engaging the community by using decentralised approaches
- 5.More learning is needed, always, on how to enable frictionless and accountable decision-making - including learning from how people have attempted it in the past.
- 1.Small groups / subcultures / fractals - similar but not identical ideas
- 2.Is it about everyone aligning with a core group’s ideas?
- 3.Or do the ideas stem from a group’s culture, identity and experiences, their identity, who they are?
- 4.What is the distinction between "the group" and "the wider community"? Should there be a division?
- 5.Can friction and dissent be positive?