DAO Check: Getting Stewardship Right - Tamara Helenius

so [Music] okay cool hi everyone so my name is tamara and i'm the program manager at common stack and a steward in the tec uh token engineering commons and today we're going to talk about um getting stewardship right so we're going to cover a bunch of stuff today i'm going to try to cover a lot of stuff pretty quick uh the first thing i'd like to do is uh give you a quick intro about the token engineering commons then talk about why stewardship even matters and then talk about some of the things we've learned building uh stewardship in the tec oh i'm stuck here okay um before we begin i just want to say that coordination and leadership is two areas that's really rapidly evolving in the uh in the web 3 space there are traditional practices that we've ported into web3 and there are new emergent practices that are evolving with the new tools that we have um with these merging these two together we can actually create something entirely new permissionless organizations permissionless work and it's these practices we're building that are going to shape the future of human coordination and how we organize ourselves and it's actually this that i'm most excited about so i'm excited to share it with you today and here we go quick introduction of the tec and the reason i'm doing this is because stewardship practices will actually reflect the organization that they're a part of and the token engineering commons is a very special and specific organization uh designed to create long-term sustainable regenerative economies to support a public good for the token engineering commons public good means research uh education and open source software that will advance token engineering the tec genesis story so token engineering commons was a dream of a number of people um griff green michael zarghum jeff emmett angela crichton vice and there's a number of different organizations that participated in creating this token engineering commons block science did a lot of the research common stack did a lot of the research commonstack helped design the cultural and technical build which i'll talk about quickly and the community of token engineers were the ones who decided that they wanted to build a commons to support token engineering the community their own community development skills of one hive common swarm actually built these tools so there's a number of organizations and even people see simon de la ruvier who created the bonding curve um for mechanisms for token continuous token issuance and trent mcconaughey the founder of ocean protocol who are very big early supporters of the token engineering commons common stack design patterns so common stock is the organization that created these design patterns that the token engineering community used to launch the token engineering commons the technical build is what you expect it to be it's smart contracts governance tools initialization conditions and the cultural build is based on the eight principles that eleanor ostrom derived when she did field research into existing commons uh we used to think that the tragedy of the commons was real and because of her work we now understand that self-governing communities can happen and she derived these eight principles and their entire cultural build was built uh around these eight principles olivia de shermeyer will actually be talking right here on this stage in less than an hour about the cultural build and a framework for self-actualizing economies so please stick around for that and as the program manager manager at common stack i am particularly interested in developing tested repeatable protocols for stewardship for future economies that will launch their own comments so the token engineering commons was the very first one and there will be future comments hopefully this year so that's what i'm here to talk about stewardship um stewardship is the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care i'm not going to tell you the tec got everything right because we made lots of mistakes but the benefit of our mistakes is that everyone gets to learn from them and not repeat them so there's going to be some mistakes we share too and getting it right is an ongoing process stewardship is not set it and forget it it's a it's a it's important it's a living thing and it's adaptability should be built into it why does this matter i'm going to give you three reasons um the future of work is permissionless i don't think anyone in this audience is surprised to hear me say that and probably a lot of people have the same conviction that i do about it uh is there anyone in this room that works for a traditional organization centralized organization you have a boss you have a ceo you're interviewed you were hired okay maybe that's all going to go away one day we see it happening already we're a part of it traditional organizations require permission to work somebody needs to hire you somebody needs to approve the work you do somebody needs to make sure you're doing the work that they want you to do and permissionless organizations displace employment as the front door to work this is a very great um medium article by one of the contributors in the tc gideon row that i would encourage people to read if they are interested in this the second reason is that decentralized is not distributed um people from outside web 3 even people inside web3 may think wait doesn't decentralized mean no leaders that nobody tells anybody what to do anymore nobody everyone gets to sort of do whatever they want all the time but decentralized doesn't mean no leaders taos have to have leadership those that embody the values of the dow values that can be passed on uh stewards create this thing that will never die that no matter how many people in the community come in or leave that when stewards come in or leave this thing continues to exist and the mission goes on if one leader leaves or fails the entire organization doesn't stop it they're the uh parallel leaders or leadership keeps it moving forward because leadership isn't evenly distributed doesn't mean leadership potential has to be and what i mean by that is leadership potential should be distributed meaning everyone has an equal chance to grow and rise merit-based in a democracy so what you do will improve your leadership capabilities the more you stay in the dao and understand how it works okay and the third thing of why it matters is dao success is contingent on getting stewardship right i think um there's a lot of dows that have exploded because of conflict with the people who are leading the dow or uh negligence or many different reasons and i think getting getting uh stewardship right can make or break a dow a permissionless organization the same way it can make or break a traditional organization a mission a a movement or a a regular institution so permissionless the permissionless nature of daos or organic elements the porous membranes and intertwined ecosystems create something similar to a living organism they shift they change they're almost unpredictable in a living ecosystem so why am i showing you scaffolding this is the scaffolding many of us are familiar with it's aluminum and steel it's strong but it's inflexible it's heavy and when pieces fall they injure people i lived in new york city my whole life i attest to that they take a lot of time to erect and take down who here is familiar with scaffolding in hong kong it's a marvel has anyone seen walked by one of these buildings okay so not so many people so maybe the other other people in this room will be surprised to find out that it's made of bamboo simple bamboo rods cheap sustainable raw material lightweight and adaptable strength wise ratio is far greater than steel uh strength weight ratio is far greater than steel and when they are properly installed far stronger than steel this is a building that has been scaffolded in bamboo it's quite common and really extraordinary to see and it's this idea lightweight and adaptive like bamboo protocols for stewardship that i think are relevant for the changing dynamics of these permissionless organizations um as dynamics change stewardship is going to need to change and evolve and rules will need to change and the community will change and the way the community wants their stewardship to behave and act will change too uh the participants of the economy should have a say so we go back to and i may go back to this a few times in this presentation eleanor ostroms and eleanor ostrom's principles and maybe i'll just take one moment to say if you're not familiar with the work of eleanor ostrom um she does so she does amazing grounds work and field research on uh existing sustainable commons and won a nobel prize in 2009 for her work on self-governing economies okay so above ground scaffolding to underground scaffolding mycelium the term mycorrhizae comes from the words fungus and root and stewards are the root of the organization in the same way that mycelium connects plants together stewards connect work streams together working groups circles pods what whatever they're called in in your dao and instead of transferring water nitrogen carbon and other materials they transfer ideas learnings innovations skills and stewards are the web 3 the mycelium of web 3. in this one uh image there's block science token engineering prime tc one hype giveth common stack long tail financial and uh there are stewards in each of these who are in multiple dows and stewarding in multiple dows and bring those learnings from one group to another um stewards are the force that nourish the groups uh within the dow itself but most importantly across many different dows because we're building organizations that can only thrive if we collaborate with each other and in fact in order to compete with traditional organizations permissionless work taos will need to collaborate with each other or they're going to eat our lunch and this is again a nod to principle number eight nested enterprises build responsibility for governing the commons resource in nested tiers from the lowest levels up to the entire interconnected ecosystem okay in this part i want to share some of the things we've learned so some things from past experience we knew how to do some things we experimented with sometimes we were successful and sometimes we fell flat on our face um and learned from it and changed uh but i want to start with this because the token engineering commons we've been building the stewardship group for a year and a half maybe a little longer even two years maybe after many months of reflection and observation we really found that it boils down to three base needs active and present student lead steward servant leaders in the know and this venn diagram the stewards are in the center active and present that makes sense right you're on the discord server you're available you're in some meetings if somebody needs to reach you ask you a question they can get a hold of you in the know that makes sense i have a question how do i do this how does this token work where can i find more information about this the stewards are the people that hold the knowledge of the dao and can answer that question and if they can't answer it they're going to go get you an answer it's servant leadership that i think was the eureka moment when crafting the in building a stewardship group and that's a leadership philosophy that focuses on the growth of the individuals and the community in which they're a part of so you can think about leaders as little dictators who tell people what to do and you could think about leaders as people who become successful by making other people successful so making other people successful is the key to excellence and stewardship and these characteristics are the 10 characteristics of servant leadership awareness i'm going to just talk about a few so the ability to step outside and view themselves and their own perspectives in the greater context of the situation listening so hearing communicating by listening it's not an oxymoron communicating by hearing what people are saying to you um empathy being able to see other people's point of view and perspective building community fostering and developing the community in the organization but most important the commitment to community member growth so looking for ways to help the community that you're a part of become stronger develop personal and professional skills and contribute to the organization that you're working on so better stewardship more of this less of that so more uh manifestos uh the stewards are a group in the token engineering commons we have a steward working group and it is comprised of a steward from all of the other uh 10 working groups and the stewards meet even though it's a stewards working group it is open and available and transparent anyone from the community can come to the calls can participate in the discussion can join in the sprint planning in the sprint retrospective during the community calls uh it's very very open but the manifesto tells you what your shared goals are as a group uh what are your uh what does success look like and what does failure look like and how do you know if you're succeeding or failing if you haven't written that criteria down clear on and off boarding i am just going to jump to this very quickly we realized that onboarding was pretty easy but off-boarding's hard people get tied to this idea of stewardship as a status and they don't want to let go of it and if they don't if they don't have the time to become a steward to participate as a steward anymore they move on to another project or they have a life emergency they don't want to let go of the title of stewardship so we made the off-boarding process very gentle so that we can have people off board without it feeling like something is being taken away from them uh less of this back channel coordination it's very easy to fall into our dms to coordinate information but that quickly turns into a game of telephone oh did who told you to do what oh this is here where do we find that but having open and transparent um coordination we use the scrum framework so we have sprint planning we have a sprint board where everyone can see the work that we're doing and um i sprint retrospective to talk about what went well and how we can do better i'm gonna skip the right set the right seven uh actually i'm not gonna skip it there's seven key things that i thought were really that it really nailed it these are these aren't mine this is credit to aaron dingman the host of brave new worlds podcast and they really nailed it these are the seven things you need to make sure you're focused on and you have a clear idea about and the dow check for stewardship so wrap it up take away is um dao success is contingent on getting stewardship right if you want to make a change in this world long-term sustainable you need a strong lightweight adaptive stewardship here's how to do it fine stewards that meet the three base needs continually develop torrent toward servant leadership so develop your stewardship team and work by having the right seven well defined thank you so much and if you um any of you in the audience have more questions um are you available for a q a outside if yes with pleasure i'll be right outside awesome and um i actually really loved your presentation are you going to be posting it anywhere yes yes we'll post it and the token engineering commons twitter t-e-c-m-n-s will be sharing it hopefully in like the next hour or two