How to DAO course notes (Sep-Oct 2021)

How to DAO course notes (Sep-Oct 2021)

A comprehensive course about DAOs - Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.

crypto, DAO, web3, ethereum

How to DAO

(DAO: Decentralised Autonomous Organisation)

Sep–Oct 2021

A four-week, better-than-free course on the future of co-operation

Funded by the DAOhaus UberHaus

Lead facilitator Stephen Reid (@daoist321)

Best viewed with 'Print layout' off (View > uncheck 'Print layout')

Join the next live cohort by signing up to the waitlist at https://dandelion.earth/events/60deda020a7fd500113e9296

View the report on the course

Session 1 prep

Session 1: Introduction to DAOs

Game theory & coordination failure

More on multipolar traps

The evolution of coordination

Coordination in nature

Computational biology

Ownership and decision making in the legacy legal system

Provocations on property/ownership

Ursula K. Le Guin & The Dispossessed

Ownership of organisations

Traditional

Worker-led/steward-led

Golden shares

Case study: Equal Care Co-op: a multi-stakeholder platform co-operative

Participatory budgeting

Blockchain 101

Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency

Ethereum: the world computer

Smart contracts

DAOs

What is a DAO?

Why DAO/what problems do DAOs solve?

An overview of the DAO space

Structure of DAOs

Holacracy & Sociocracy

Coin voting

Proof-of-personhood

Quadratic voting

Vote delegation/liquid democracy

Conviction voting

Other issues with coin voting

Zodiac Seele

Beyond coin voting: Separation of voting and economic rights (>> DAOhaus!)

Homework

Session 1 recording

Session 2 prep

Session 2: Introduction to DAOhaus

Shares and loot

Proposal types

Stages of a proposal

Intro to Boosts

Discord Notifications

Discourse Forum

Safe Minion

sesh

Homework

Session 2 recording

Session 3 prep

Session 3: Deeper into DAOhaus

More boosts

Mintgate

Superfluid

Recognising contributions

Collab.land

Coordinape

SourceCred

Useful web2 software to support decision-making

Loomio

Polis

Federated DAOs

UberHaus

Panvala

PrimeDAO

Homework

Session 3 recording

Session 4 prep

Session 4: The Future of DAOs

Working for DAOs

Opolis

Utopia Labs

Legal DAOs

Ricardian LLC (Delaware)

Otoco (Delaware or Wyoming)

Horizontal organising frameworks

Reinventing Organisations, Teal & the work of Frederic Laloux

Going Horizontal

The Hum

Better Work Together

The role of Source

Running great meetings

Feedback & growth

Culture & relating

Shared care & organising in pods

Conflict, resolution & endings

Graviton

The future of DAOhaus: Moloch v3/Baal

Session 4 recording

Session 1 prep

Welcome to the How to DAO course! We will be 100 people from across the globe tuning in live for 2 hours every Wednesday 4pm-6pm UK time, starting 22nd Sep.

If you haven't already, please join the How to DAO Discord via https://discord.gg/MN4XDBQukC and introduce yourself in #introductions.

A reminder: You will be sent prep tasks at least a few days before each session (allow 1 hour), and homework at the end of each session (allow 1 hour). To get the most out of the course you should also set aside at least 2 hours per session to go back through the notes, read some of the links provided and make sure you've understood everything we've covered. So that's a minimum of 6 hours per session for maximum benefit (1 hour prep, 2 hours live, 2 hours revision, 1 hour homework).

The first hour of the live sessions will be used to underline some of the key points from the preparatory reading/watching, as a tour of the rest of the notes from the session, and sometimes to give live, on-chain walkthroughs of certain tasks. The second hour will feature presentations followed by Q&A with a number of experts from the DAO space.

For this first session, my approach is to provide you with a 'map of the territory' along with a ton of high quality content, and then leave it up to you to pick which areas you want to go into deeper. We won't have time to cover everything in detail. I suggest you use the 2 hours revision time to read more about anything you found particularly challenging or interesting.

OK, here's the prep for the first session:

Let's generate some excitement by starting with this pair of high-rhetoric/high-production value/low-on-specifics videos from the first DAO hype wave in 2018:

* Aragon - The fight for freedom (5m)

* Introducing DAOstack (v2) (5m)

From there, check out some content on the development of organisations, game theory and coordination failure:

* Watch The Laloux Culture Model (until 6m45)

* Watch Coordination Games - Christopher Coyne (8m)

* Read Know Thy Enemy: Coordination Failures by Kevin Owocki (one of our guest experts for session 1)

Read at least one the following articles:

* A Prehistory of DAOs (by Kei Kreutler)

* DAO Landscape (by Coopahtroopa)

* A beginner's guide to DAOs  (by Linda Xie)

Listen to at least one of the following and start/join a thread offering some reflections in #session-1 in the How to DAO Discord:

* DAO Panel | Kain Warwick, Coopahtroopah, Tracheopteryx (Bankless, Aug 2021)

* Meditations On Moloch (audio version of the well-known essay)

* Slaying Moloch | Ameen Soleimani & Kevin Owocki (Bankless, Oct 2020)

* 'Humanity's Phase Shift', Daniel Schmachtenberger (Rebel Wisdom, Nov 2018)

Finally, read the DAOhaus docs pages: What is a DAO?, The Bank and Membership.

Note, I won't be going into detail about how blockchains work. If you need that background, watch Anders' Blockchain Demo

You're encouraged to start discussions about anything from this session you find interesting in the #session-1 channel in the How to DAO Discord.

See you on 22nd Sep at 4pm UK time at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/96014715205 (same link for all sessions).

Best,

Stephen

Session 1: Introduction to DAOs

Santiago Siri (@santisiri) is the cofounder and president of Democracy Earth, a non-profit organisation backed by Y Combinator that is behind the UBI Universal Basic Income token on Ethereum and the Proof of Humanity protocol. He is also Executive Director of DAO Education and the author of Hacktivismo,​ published 2015 by Random House.

Featuring Santi:

* "Identity is The One Vulnerability Being Exploited Across All Systems. It’s the Mother of All Battles:" Santiago Siri (The Defiant podcast, May 2020)

* Meet the Man With a Radical Plan for Blockchain Voting (Wired, 2018)

Game theory & coordination failure

* Introduction to Game Theory

Conclusions from Coordination Games - Christopher Coyne:

How to solve coordination problems:

1. Formal standards: Rules that are codified by certain parties/rules about how parties are supposed to act, and/or

2. Social conventions: A regularity followed by people belonging to a group/a shared expectation of the correct way to behave

(It seems to me this isn't really a binary, it's more a spectrum of formality. What's important is that there's communication and agreement on rules/conventions.)

* The Evolution of Trust: an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other

Conclusions from The Evolution of Trust:

"Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly."

Key passages from Meditations On Moloch (OG essay on slatestarcodex.com, audio version here)

"Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and finesse."

"The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanisms. Many other things besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.

For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions, jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example, against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them.

But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you).

Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions [that aren't governments] that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives."

From Know Thy Enemy: Coordination Failures:

"If only there was a technology that allowed groups of humans to choose to easily coordinate with one another! A transparent substrate for trust games where everyone knows where they stand and whose rules can’t be changed on you.

My belief is that this is the ultimate legacy of Ethereum [/smart contracts]. We can now program our values into our economic system—the final form of a stateful internet could allow us to coordinate the actions of multiple economic actors and therefore could solve coordination failures."

Where we're going with this: DAOhaus DAOs (and other no-code DAO platforms) provide crystal-clear (cryptographic) expectations of what the 'rules of the game' are, such that they enable and encourage a higher standard of coordination/co-operation.

No-code DAO platforms have the potential to act as a Schelling point for 'co-operating with money', effectively standardising what it means to be a multi-stakeholder co-op and massively reducing the cost/friction of both inter-organisation collaboration, and participants switching between organisations.

More on coordination:

* 33 - Slaying Moloch | Ameen Soleimani & Kevin Owocki (Bankless podcast)

* Kevin Owocki: It's all Coordination

* Coordination Problems: What It Takes to Change the World

* Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by