How to Contribute to DAOs - Tracheopteryx

all right hi everybody i'm trachei objects from yearn and from coordinate and i'm going to be talking about how to contribute to daos so i got into d5 in some d5 summer 2020 and what happened was a friend sent me a text said buy wifey wi-fi i was like okay let me take a look at this and it was good because i bought it pretty cheap but it was the last day of farming but i was blown away because here was a truly decentralized organization born out of just this explosion of of generosity where andre gave all the wi-fi to uh to the world and i just had to be a part of it and this was really as far as i could tell the most decentralized kind of first organism like this on the planet and from the start there was nobody really in charge andre was not in charge we were all trying to figure out how to make it work and we developed all these structures and over the last almost two years uh we've learned a lot a lot about what it means to participate in a real dow and so i'm going to share some of that now the first thing is what is a dow right there's so many different types of dows so here's a definition that dowser decentralized networks of agents controlling property with smart contracts so what differentiates a dow from a corporation is that it's on blockchain and it's able to have this real decentralized participation and shared ownership and the contribution part is these agents controlling property how do you become a part of that aspect to the dow but first we have to start by thinking about the network right because daos are these complex network entities they often don't have a clear boundary they don't have when they're good dow they don't have a clear command and control structure they're more like biology um and so here's a network map of all the participants in a dao and in the center you can see there's about 20 percent these are the people that are working non-stop for the dow you know these are the core contributors then around them 40 these are the part-time contributors the people that come in they maybe submit a pull request or they help out on the forum and then beyond that these are the maybe let's say the token holders everybody here is probably a token holder but these are people that maybe vote on governance every once in a while stuff like that now you might think you want to get everybody in the middle you don't you what you want is to have people be able to choose where they want to go because a healthy dow is one where all the agents in it are sovereign and they're deciding for themselves what they're doing and how they're going to participate and you want it to be as permissionless as possible but without total permission list because there are some features that need to have gates on them but really a dow is more like biology than we're usually used to you know working in a normal corporate environment there's a rigid hierarchy there's nothing wrong with hierarchy the the sun is bigger than the moon there's no getting around this it's a natural feature of the world if i'm talking to a phd quantum physicist i'm not going to pretend like i have the same level of understanding as they do that's fine that's a natural hierarchy you want fluid hierarchies not rigid hierarchies these rigid hierarchies are brittle in the corporate structure where there's command and control all of the information moves up through the chain and gets decided on to the small group of people that's a real cognitive limitation for that group how can these small people know everything that should happen this giant network of people you know what you see is this kind of dissociation of the corporate body from the reality of its environment which causes run it like you know accelerated extraction and all these bad consequences but in a dow you can function more like biology more sense and respond feature way of working and so this is a image of you a cellular metabolism in a cell of a ribosome uh trna mrna this is the process of creating proteins and so the way proteins are made you have a trna these little guys here and amino acids and each trna is going to bind to a specific amino acid and there's no boss telling them what to bind to it's like these dudes just like these things and they grab them that's what they like to do that's their sovereign choice they're in consent that's what they want to do and when they do that it happens to turn into a good byproduct which is now that trna rm amino acid pair can bind to the mrna to a codon and then a ribosome can come around and it can grab it and it can say hey this is cool let's stick this over here and then you create a protein all just people floating in space doing what they are called to do creating something valuable and the way that that works is you need the right structure for the valuable thing to come out otherwise the people just going to bump into each other so the work of creating a successful dow is creating the right structure but we have to understand what this is before you can even do that so how do you even know what to do you're a little amino acid bumping around with all your friends like how do you know what you're supposed to do there's nobody telling you what to do this happens at urine all the time people come in they're like i want to do something it's like great well do it you know like all the resources is there it's open it's all on chain everything's open source like here's all our docs like make something and so it's so new for people because we're so used to outsourcing the responsibility for our own actions and desires to other people you get into a business and it's like now my boss tells me what's good or my dad tells me what's good right or some group of people on twitter tell me what to think but now in a dow you have to take that back you have to take that responsibility back and choose for yourself what you want and reconnect with your actual you know cognition and sensation and belief about the world so here's one model to do that this is comes from ikigai which is a japanese concept but i've changed a little bit for daos so when you're in a dao the thing the best thing for you to do is what's in the center there it's a combination of what you love just purely what you love doing don't worry about evaluating it just what is alive in you what you're best at you know what your skills are that's you know easy to find what you can be paid for that that's important information because these things exist in a market so what you can be pay for it a lot is going to help that down and then finally what the dow needs now everything in that area in the red area what the dow needs is going to be something good to do for the dow but the stuff in the middle is going to be of most value and so what is the actual act of contributing to a dow it is an execution and a good doubt there's going to be a lot of permissionless executions available you might be able to find these on a bounty board or on a trello board or in a github project or any number of places or just in the discord and then you're going to execute so now you've found the thing that you want to do you're going to execute it but this doesn't guarantee it's going to be valuable there's no boss telling you that this is what you should do etc and you might do things they might not be valuable so in a dow with all these sovereign agents we have to bring in a much more evolved notion of consent so this is a model actually that comes from betty martin from the sacred sexuality world which helps you understand how to relate to other people you know in what the true nature of consent is um and it's super useful for us too so there's these the top part are active things the bottom part are passive things to receive on the left there are things you're giving you're giving a gift to the things on the right and on the right are things that are getting and so this breaks down into four things you can be serving you know like you know i'm gonna make some food for you you can be taking i'm gonna you know um i'm gonna uh whatever you're taking you're gonna be accepting or you can be allowing and we'll get into details on each of these but also importantly is in the middle that red area that's the stuff that's in consent that's the stuff you actually want to do on the outside of the stuff that's outside of consent that maybe you don't really want to do you ever get in that situation you're like you agree to do something you don't really want to do it you have to learn this little nuance here so let's say you're this contributor in a dow and um you're saying like hey like i can't find the uh the financials where are the financials at you know in the discord you're kind of taking in this case this case you're taking up space you know you're making noise like maybe this isn't helpful and the dow over here is like a version of this like this isn't a contribution this is noise right but then maybe you said hey you know i can't find the financials you're taking but actually this helps the dow because the dow is like damn you know what our financials are no longer posted in the place where they should be thank you for letting me know i'm going to go and fix them so the same execution might be a contribution in one case and might be interference in another or maybe you're a designer and you really want to make a logo for the style but maybe you're a designer and nobody wants your logo the dao is going to be you know when i say the dao this is the whole organism you know this is all the people in the dow whatever they might not want it that's okay you know maybe it's the wrong community for you maybe you're actually a good designer just not the right style or maybe you are a really good designer and the dow really wants your product but they're not offering any compensation so that's not really in consent for you you know you're outside but then maybe they add some money to the equation and now you're down now you want to provide it that's also in consent that's great you found a connection there or let's say you're a really great developer and um you can allow allowing is a contribution too you say hey you know here's my private repo take a look at it this is passive but you're giving a gift and the dow might really enjoy that or maybe you don't want to share that information don't or you know the last one is accepting so how can a contributor within a doubt you know be contributing by accepting receiving an air drop you know dowse all the time like the dows do air drops because it's valuable for them so this is great the dow wants you to take this money and you want to take it too or maybe it's a coin and you don't want it you know so looking a little bit more closely at execution there's more nuance to it we have to bring out so it's permissionless execution and it starts with inspiration here's something i want to do then you do it and then there's an evaluation afterwards and that evaluation might happen unconsciously it's just a emergent thing like it's like this was great and just everyone loves it you know and there's no process there's no reward you just feel good about it or maybe it's clear that it was bad or it can be more formal there can be formal evaluation processes like a grants committee that gives you money and that lets you know that this was a valuable contribution or coordinate but a tool that i i founded with a bunch of people from yearn where it does decentralize compensation and any member of the group at the end of a month can share money with each other and maybe you get a lot of give tokens which comes from that and you're like wow okay i did good but it doesn't always happen on its own it's always part of a cycle inspiration execution evaluation and then completion and completion is the part where it's like okay maybe you get paid maybe you get recognized maybe your logo gets used and put on the website to close the loop on the action but this is all permissionless it gets even more fun when you add in permissioned experiences right permission things this is what we're all familiar from from the proposal process in a dow you know you go to unit swap and you write a proposal to give somebody some money and then people pass it and people like what um or maybe you know it goes any other way um but so this is the full possible cycle for permissioned actions where inspiration you write a proposition or proposal then some group makes a decision maybe it's token weighted voting maybe it's a small a wide team a delegated power team within the group then you can execute it it can be evaluated and completed so this is important to know because this is how work happens in a decentralized organization and each of these nodes can be permissionless to one way or another and each of these nodes might have specific processes attached to them that will help you to execute the work and to contribute even better and to find an even better sync within that organism and it's fractal right each of those six pieces has all six pieces within it because the decision making process might have the exact same internal process and it goes all the way down so for these decisions you know at urine urine started um totally permissionless right sorry totally decentralized totally open and we use the same model that a lot of dows use which is you know on chain voting uh in a you know discourse forum but that was for like everything and people were submitting proposals like you know andre should do this podcast or or whatever and it's like this doesn't make sense you know and it's also super limiting because if you try and make a a dow totally decentralized but you just have one channel for decision making that's not really reflex reality because humans group together they create decisions together they create power structures they create trusted relationships and none of that really gets surfaced to the foreground in a standard down model so we created a new model that we call constrained delegation or governance ii and what this does is it foregrounds the trusted relationships that emerge in any human network and instead of letting them be in the shadow the hidden power structures behind the facade of a decentralized community it brings them to the front and it says explicitly these people are empowered to make these decisions and if you don't like it here are the levers you can pull so this is a bit of a complicated chart but all of those little diamonds are powers they're specific powers these are specific types of decisions because you can look at any dow and you can break it into 100 different types of decisions that need to get made which ones require a gated process which ones are permissionless which ones need a lot of deliberation which ones have catastrophic uh consequences if they happen wrong and then you can create the correct consensus mechanisms and decision-making processes for each of these some need to be very fast some can take a month all of these are different nuances so in this way wifey holders the token holders can vote to delegate powers to specific teams these are the green circles each of these teams are emerging nobody is saying you guys get to be a team anybody can say we're going to be a team we want to be a team or just me i want this power and then the wifey holders can decide and then one of that that what that does what what this system does is it helps with decision making for processes within a dow well one of the biggest another huge uh barrier to having daos really function in the decentralized way and when they are decentralized by the way it's not just because that's a cool word it's far more robust right it's robust against attack it's robust against um one single actor taking over control collusion and beyond all of that these are things we're familiar with it's just a better form of collective intelligence it allows for leadership to rise in any part of the dao regardless of who you are or or what you're coming from or how old you are it's a leaderful organization where anybody that whoever knows best the leader can be who knows what to do next right that's what you want in a doubt and you need this type of system to do that but one of the big challenges for dows is compensation too so decentralized this is making sure but decentralized compensation how do you do that we ran into this problem at urine and so we built a tool called coordinate which allows for fully decentralized compensation you can take any budget you put it into a coordinate circle and all the members of that circle share it with each other through a decentralized voting process and even the membership of that circle can grow in a decentralized way by creating trusted one-to-one relationships between the members if i vouch for you uh you can get into the circle or you need three people to voucher you need ten people to vouch you depends on the circle and now you become a member of that circle you can start contributing and getting rewarded without any you know ceo or central body making a decision that's it if we have any questions from the audience we'll be taking them at this time it's a really great talk um what i'm curious is about is you mentioned that like if someone vouches for you then like um that can well i internalize it as like creating credibility i'm wondering if in the very early stages of a dao which a lot of places are um couldn't they be vulnerable to like one bad actor bringing in all their daddy friends so the question was if you allow membership via vouching decentralized vouching which is kind of giving somebody some form of reputation can't some unscrupulous actor come in and take over or do bad things uh yes people can do bad things and they do but when you create a vouching system like this you're creating a chain of accountability and so you know it looks bad for you if you bring in a bad actor and also in coordinate the potential for bad actions are fairly non-catastrophic like it would be pretty hard to steal very much money and it would be very obvious just through the nature of the give circle so first of all great talk thank you thank you can you turn the volume up in the mic i can't quite hear him hey there okay so uh so my my question really centers on the idea that like what i'm struggling with is how do i incorporate contrarianism and value contrarianism can you say louder please how can i incorporate contrarianism into my dow and value contrarianism in a meaningful way and then secondarily can we do the same thing with empathy because those are valuable components of a healthy organization but difficult to represent in code yeah hell yeah that's a great question um so the question was how can we create systems that allow for contrarianism or people to have differing points of view as well as empathy and i think the key thing there is sovereignty right now this word gets maligned a little bit because you can think of a sovereign as a king somebody has dominion over other people but that's only kind of one developmental lens on this idea a little bit more of an awakened perspective on this is that i have control over my own being over my own needs of my own feelings i don't outsource that to anybody and i decide if i want to create a trusted relationship with somebody and if they hurt me that's okay i'm open to that right it's a little touchy feely but this is actually the foundation of how this type of decentralized work has to happen the agents have to be sovereign or else there's going to be unhealthy larger organisms and when you have this type of sovereignty and we have first of all you need a system that can support that right there's been studies you know you put a bunch of people into a jail they start to act like they're inmates right you put people into a beautifully designed like um architecture building they're going to collaborate in a better way right so the dao has those same features and the structure of a dao is going to directly relate to the quality of the culture so blockchain does tremendous thing here which it takes away a tremendous amount of fear because all the assets all your money they're safe they're safer right and then from that you can build these trusted relationships and that's why you see in this community so much trust like i've had so many people say yeah i'll just give you money for this project no problem you know or like let's do something like handshake deals all over the place well i ran companies for years normal companies everything's papered you know contracts lawyers whatever you don't need that here it's because there's this foundation of trust and then on top of that people become more free to be themselves and to voice their opinion because they know the consequences right or to be empathic all right we'll wrap up our questions here thank you once again a warm round of applause for a speaker our next speaker is asher shaheed from api 3 and their workshop is entitled how to use