DAOs Need Co-Created Structures
A conversation with David Ehrlichman on the latest episode of Building At The Edges. Plus the SC06 interest form and newly listed network opportunities.
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DAOs Need Co-Created Structures
David Ehrlichman, co-founder of Converge and Hats Protocol, draws from his background in decentralized organizing to inform a theory of web3 coordination. He is also the author of Impact Networks, a book that appears in the DAOish type of guy starter pack. The placement is well founded; while written prior to David’s work in web3, Impact Networks provides a methodology for building enduring DAOs as DAOs are a kind of community-owned impact network. The compounding actions of effective impact networks are: clarifying purpose and principles, convening the people, cultivating trust, coordinating actions, and collaborating to change the system as a whole.
An evergreen pursuit for DAOs is the search for the right people. From contributors to members, each of these community archetypes are collective owners in these networks. Their impact is amplified compared to the role of passive pre-web3 users. Jess and David explore the notion of thoughtful exclusion, which is another way of saying community curation. Citing the work of Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering — arguably another book in the DAOish type of guy starter pack — David proposes excluding with purpose.
Within finding the right people and giving those people the context and authority to take the best action, David also makes the case for constrained delegation. This term is another way of acknowledging an emerging truism within the DAO space: work is best accomplished in smaller, high-context coordination groups. In practice, this looks like clearly identifying a scope of authority enabling individuals to take actions within a defined domain. Whole communities, he argues, cannot and should not make decisions on things for which they have little to no context.
Blockchains are a technology of social scalability. DAOs are new institutions enabling us to scale our contributions. Yet our ability to scale will by hindered by the fallacy of structurelessness and leaderless organizations. We need a practice of cultivating leader-full organizations and, as David argues, co-created structures. A community without boundaries is no community at all.
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