Club Pod Miniseries: At the Edges of Coordination
Our 4-part Club Pod miniseries drops today 🎙 plus an Early Majority exclusive for $CLUB members.
At the Edges of Coordination: A Club Pod miniseries
DAOs have figured out how to pool capital quickly, and communities continue to experiment with novel means of value accrual. Yet the most promising – and most elusive – innovation lies in how we collectively allocate that capital toward meaningful outputs.
In our new Club Pod miniseries At the Edges of Coordination, Jess Sloss – instigator and co-creator at Seed Club – chats with four web3 governance practitioners and operators to explore both the challenges and opportunities of DAO coordination. The series includes:
Pet3rpan on Minimizing Governance
Julia Rosenberg on Scaling Socialware
David Phelps on Incentivizing Contrarianism
Jango on Allocating Treasuries
We have centuries of inspiration to draw from on collective decision-making – from democratic nation states to traditional corporate structures to the natural world. The DAO governance design space is ripe for iteration, driven by the core value proposition of web3: democratized ownership enabled by tokens.
As a space, we imagine tokens as a self-regulating path to aligned incentives. Our collective thesis is that if we all have a stake in a community represented by a token, then we’ll act in the best interest of the community to consistently raise the value of the token. But it turns out incentive alignment is a slippery thing.
Web3 governance conversations generally focus on governance frameworks and the tools that facilitate them. We wanted to go the next layer down on coordination to explore possible answers to the question: What is the governance layer 0?
Decentralization is not synonymous with leaderlessness. It’s our belief that we need leaderful organizations even within our pursuit of decentralization. In our conversation with Pet3rpan, investor at 1kx, Jess and Pet3rpan discuss the usefulness of governance constraints toward governance minimization. Decentralized coordination and community building are developable skills, and yet there is no replacement for the experience of running and failing experiments.
In our conversation with Julia Rosenberg, co-founder and chief pod officer of Metropolis (formerly Orca), we deep dived on the concept of pods. Pods build on the embedded socialware within small groups of people, creating an automated container for coordination. Jess and Julia discuss current governance experiments, both successes and challenges. Recent DAO shakeups demonstrate an over-indexing against centralization and corporate structure. As we move toward scalable trustware, there is one socialware that cannot be automated: leadership.
What if we incentivized contrarian governance? David Phelps is the co-founder of JokeDAO, a governance platform for decentralized, bottom-up governance. In a recent essay collaboration on Not Boring, David takes a stand against consensus in DAO governance. He argues that forking — more specifically, contrarian opinions — presents a more interesting opportunity for governance innovation. Jess and David touch briefly on the value of community curation, the complications of off-chain + on-chain coordination, and the persistent challenge of the attention economy.
We return to the evergreen challenge of allocating with treasures, with Jango from Juicebox. Web3 coordination often exists at the intersection of large treasuries. Innovative means of capital allocation is one of the most promising crypto design spaces. Jess and Jango discuss automated funding mechanisms, the use case for frequent proposal and discourse periods, and how this could unlock more DAO experiments.
Listen to the full series now on your preferred podcast streaming platform.
Outdoor apparel brand Early Majority launches their genesis Member Badge NFT collection
All $CLUB holders with 10 or more tokens are on the allowlist to mint as a founding member. In addition to the NFT, you will receive an Early Majority Bum Bag, plus a Seed Club badge to go with it.
Early Majority Member Badge mint details:
Who: $CLUB token holders with 10+ tokens (as of 9/7)
When: 8AM PDT
Where: mint.earlymajority.com
The NFT comes with all the benefits of membership, plus everyone who mints and holds onto their NFT until September 22 will receive a limited edition Early Majority Bum Bag 2.0 and physical member badge.
Hold your NFT until September 22 for your chance to win:
1 in 500 minters receive one of everything EM makes, forever: earlymajority.com/collection/mint-collection
1 in 100 minters receive an All Eventualities Mint Kit: https://www.earlymajority.com/products/all-eventualities-kit
1 in 10 minters receive a piece of Early Majority apparel
Minting your token as a $CLUB holder, will get you your own Seed Club badge to wear on your Early Majority gear.
Read all of the details on their mint site: https://mint.earlymajority.com/