Coordination Summit | Social Rules for DAOs - Alisha.eth

[Applause] [Music] i want to bring on our very first speaker for the day and that is alicia and she's going to be talking about social rules for dao so without further ado let's welcome alicia and get the summit started hi alicia hi how's it going okay sorry i don't have video at the moment but i'm just going to share my screen everything is good to go cool so uh hi i'm alicia.eth and i'm the governance lead at ens and over the last um year or so i have been working on launching the e s dial and then kind of facilitating putting in place uh infrastructure to allow the dow to run and um in july this year we kind of just hit the start of our second term so we had been running a structure for working groups for six months and it kind of led me to reflect on the time since launch and i ended up writing this piece social rules for dalles and i thought i could just run through this piece because social rules i guess are something that people tend not to really focus on or perhaps think about as an afterthought um especially if you are launching a token a lot of thought goes into everything that you need to do to launch so related to token distribution you know getting contracts set up and things like that but what i really have spent most of my time doing since november last year is thinking about what happens once you launch your dao and you um have the mechanism to govern a project or a protocol um through executable proposals that are done on chain by token holders but um a dow is much more um in terms of operating efficiently is much more than just getting token holders to vote so uh ens has kind of implemented a range of different social structures or social environments that kind of hopefully increase the efficiency and also help the dow work towards its kind of north star of promoting the development and adoption of ens so i guess the starting point is what people think a dao is and so um basically a down its purest form is a collective group of token holders who use tokens to interact with a smart contract that can be used to govern a protocol or and or manage a treasury and so that's kind of the strictest definition of what a dow is which is that um it's just essentially the smart contracts and then the token holders around um that smart contract that vote but i guess like over the last 12 months in particular we've kind of come to think of dalles as including you know all of the different social environments that um kind of work alongside the dao and so that is kind of where actually a lot of i guess like the culture and the the action happens as it relates to adele because passing a proposal is like quite straightforward um the enes style uses tele which a lot of other dowels and the ethereum ecosystem do as well and so that's one component and um kind of beyond that i think it was important for me to be able to put in infrastructure that allowed the dow to get to the point of passing proposals and so thinking about that just kind of zooming on this image okay so all of these different kind of components of the social environment of the ens dow kind of came to being at different points in the timeline in the last year or so and so um i'll just quickly run through different things or different components of the social environment for ens um and the dao so it's snapshot uh the governance forum the constitution we have twitter a governance process or proposal flow working groups working group rules and discord so basically every community in web3 has a lot of these components if not all of them and um i think potentially a thing that is different about the e s dow is that we've been or i guess i've been pretty aggressive in really formalizing a lot of the rules around some of these different aspects of of the social environment so um i'll just quickly run through in terms of kind of what happened when we launched the dow um the enis constitution the initial constitution was a really important part of our airdrop strategy and as part of the claim for the ens token uh people had to sign in and basically approve or reject each of the five articles to the constitution and this means that so this happened on snapshot it means that ens actually has i think the largest snapshot space on snapshot if you go to snapshot.org and the reason we did that is because we felt it was important to have the legitimacy of as many token holders as possible um in terms of kind of affirming that constitution the reason that that's important is because ultimately with this with a social proposal there is nothing um there is nothing kind of uh backing up a social proposal it is really just people choosing essentially like opting in to adhere to the to those rules and so um yeah we actually had over 137 addresses eligible to claim and the constitution passed worth uh 15 million votes out of i think 25 well maybe maybe um at least 25 million um approving the constitution and i would say in terms of kind of the rank of importance of social roles within a dow that a constitution in my opinion is perhaps the single most important kind of social role that you can put in place in not only adele but potentially even like a community and it essentially provides a north star for every participant engaged in a dow whether that is um the delegates or uh community members who or token holders who hold um the ens token and are delegating and the core team and participants and working groups so a constitution just means that everyone kind of irrespective of their background their personal interests um and kind of whatever their project interests might be know that when they come to the ens dow what the goal is and so um something that's quite interesting um just in the last actually the last week and week and a half um we have had kind of a lot of discussion within the ens community um from people like vitalik and nick.eth who is the founder of ens who have kind of raised suggestions that have been discussed on twitter and um they actually kind of if they were to be implemented would be a breach of the constitution so um i had the tweet that i don't have it at the moment but essentially nick kind of tweeted about donating funds from objectionable.eth names to charities and the reason that this is this would be kind of unconstitutional if it was implemented and it's the form that it was suggested is because um it states in article 3 the income funds ens and other public goods and so a donation to a charity outside of the scope of article 3 of the constitution um is essentially a breach of the constitution and so that's just like a really tangible example of how um something a constitution as a document can be used in every day and practice to i guess like keep the dow aligned and like heading in the direction that it was intended um yeah another example is vitalik uh talking about implementing habitratex's for ens names or dot eth names and um again so in article two it says fees are primarily an incentive mechanism and one of the statements that vitalik made was that uh ens was leaving money on the table and so there might be a better way to kind of capture that value but article two of the constitution states that um you know the intent is not to capture the maximum amount of value it's just to disinfec disincentivize squatters and to ensure kind of um that names have a better chance of of being used um and so yeah those are kind of two examples of that we've just had literally in the last week of how the constitution has been really important um and i would definitely recommend kind of thinking deeply about the constitution um if you participate in a down and it doesn't have one um and another another reason a constitution is really important is just because it empowers individuals who are within the community whether they might be delegates or stewards to kind of make decisions that don't rely on kind of their personal assumptions but objectively they can say you know um based on what this grant is requesting i can see that it is aligned with article 3 of the constitution therefore the dow should grant the funds to this project so um yeah that is the constitution um and then another really kind of important part of the ens style are the working groups so if i just go back up here so working groups and working group rules and the reason that i guess i kind of uh drafted working group rules for the ens dow a month after the launch of the dow was because without some sort of structure ultimately every proposal or vote needs to go to now wide vote and this is a huge drain on um the scarcest race resource in um crypto at least which is attention um and so creating working groups was a way to allow the dao to have i guess like these entities through which it could more effectively and efficiently carry out the objective of the dao but not kind of burden delegates at the same time and so the working group rules are really extensive and we actually ended up asking snapshot to increase the word limit of snapshot proposals to accommodate the length of the working group rules but basically within ens there are three working groups media governance which relates to the dao ens ecosystem which relates to the maintenance and development of the ems ecosystem and public goods because it again it kind of states in the constitution that funds from um income funds ens and other public goods and so the constitution specifically states that public goods within web 3 should be funded and so those are the working groups the working group roles were passed as a social proposal and um again just like the constitution it means that the dow could you know move forward and pass proposals without abiding to the social the social proposals which are the working group rules but part of kind of building that culture within adele is um i guess like people in positions of influence like stewards um and large delegates kind of advocating to adhere to social rules um and if you think about it like a lot of major decisions within a dow kind of come down to whether or not everyone chooses to abide by social rules or not and um so the working groups um were kind of created by um having an election where the entire dow was able to vote on electing stewards for each of the working groups and then it's this downwind election that gives working groups and this their students the legitimacy to carry out um and make decisions uh on their own and um yeah so essentially what happened within the first six months is that there was um an election stewards were identified and elected and they passed a budget and things kind of got off to a really slow start um but this is like another important aspect of i think managing a dow and the benefit of social rules which is that um wastage is potentially like a really big issue in dalles and so is potentially like a self-interested extraction of funds particularly when there is no direction in terms of you know what the dow should be doing or who is in a position to um to distribute funds and things like that so um i guess a win for the dow in my opinion is that the difference between the first term which was the first six months of the year and the second term which started in july for the second six months of the year um the funding that the the dow working groups received um increased significantly from i think potentially like um four hundred thousand dollars across three working groups or four week groups in the first um when the first budget was passed to 3.

5 million dollars just recently and uh i think the amount of funding that the working groups received recently is kind of a testament to how effectively the working group rules are are working as um like a social structure within the ian style and um i guess that along with having rules like an important part of social rules is kind of iterating and experimenting i think the hardest thing about um or something i think about often is that ens is a protocol that you know we want to exist in a hundred years and dow's are very new and so balancing i guess like balancing doing the least risky thing possible to ensure the survival and longevity of the protocol while also having kind of some space to experiment and iterate on things that have never been done before and so with the working group rules we kind of iterated on that and they were repealed and replaced in june and um yeah i think that's the other thing with social rules is that they are more um adaptable than um you know executable rules which well actually rules don't have to be executable but executable proposals once you pass that's kind of done whereas social rules once they're in place they can still be adapted um okie dokie and so uh and then within the social rules let's go back to the diagram so within the social rules um there are working groups and the working group rules another important aspect of the the dao is the governance forum and so um the governance forum i guess is what a lot of people kind of associate with the dao and um you know it's common for people who participate in a forum to feel like they are members of the dow even though that might legally be inaccurate um and for the enes style the governance forum is definitely kind of the heartbeat of the governance activity and um you know there is a code of conduct and uh what's interesting i think about the governance forum is that it is like its own entity and something that i kind of think about as well in terms of what success might look like for the ens style is having uh multiple governance forums and so like a diversity of um different social environments which means that you kind of depending on the breadth and like the range of your community you don't have to get every single person um who is a user or involved in your project into the same governance forum um based on whatever the requirements are of the executable uh votes so for ens um there is a requirement that you have a hundred thousand e s to post a vote on chain and um if you have that then you can like completely ignore essentially the social environment and just post a vote on chain um for that vote to pass it needs a million votes to reach quorum and um a majority of votes in favor of the proposal so a lot of people most people don't have a hundred thousand votes and so they then rely on the governance forum and the associated proposal flow to be able to move proposals through um through the dow and something that is kind of interesting is that um in the piece i actually say that like the governance process is something that should be passed as a social role really early on and we didn't do this with ens and so the governance the governance proposal flow was kind of documented in some governance stocks but it was never passed um on snapshot by the dow as a social proposal and it's actually something i'm working on um in the coming weeks and i think uh in hindsight the benefit of um not passing that proposal immediately is that we have had like the experience of putting through many proposals and kind of um iterating on what the requirements and the thresholds are but um like i said earlier the point of social proposals which are um in their nature off-chain because they're not executable they don't relate to the protocol or the treasury um is that you can you can just uh put forward another proposal and change and iterate things so i'm just gonna quickly get a time check because i don't want to go over just um because i know that the lineup is jam-packed but okay so so i think um this diagram here kind of shows that um if you think about the dow in the center of a community and um basically this social environment is is what is currently the state of things for the e style so a lot of these different components of the social environment are run or operated or administered by the core team um but the point of a dao is that we're kind of moving away from this idea that there is like a centralized organizational body that um that governs everything and so in my opinion the something that would kind of increase the anti-fragility of the ens dow is for whether it's you know competing social environments or you know really niche in specific social environments to emerge from the community as a whole um that also participate that also view themselves as part of the dow um kind of as we as we refer to it [Music] in web 3 which kind of includes all of the social components and um i think that is kind of the the win that i'm working towards with ens personally and yeah i think i guess like the most important thing that i would kind of take away from social rules is that um that social rules and dolls are more important and more flexible than most people realize and um i would say as well that potentially the format of the social rules matters and so having something like a constitution can kind of feel um almost like you are setting up a legal system and that's kind of how i think about ens which is that it's a state and um you know the social rules similar to legislation um and yeah so i definitely would encourage people to think about all of the different kind of social environments that could be attached to their dao and um and then i guess like starting anywhere is a good place and um but with the constitution is probably where i'd start followed by a governance process and then kind of whatever social rules need to be put in place to manage the day-to-day operations of the dow in its mission um but yeah that's kind of been my experience it's still i'm still kind of learning every day and so um hopefully i'll have something more to report in a couple of weeks or differently in a few months but amazing thank you so much alicia it was a really insightful kind of overview and hopefully this is one of those things where you get to report this in real time and we get to observe your learnings and how do we actually quickly adapt that to uh to other communities you