What Can DAOs Learn From

foreign [Music] good morning how is everyone yeah yeah that's what I like to hear thank you all for being here thank you to the PSC team for having us I'm very excited to talk about our topic today Dows are one of my favorite things to talk about and I think sap feels the same way but basically if you are a power of Adele this talk is for you because this question here what can dolls learn from I think is something we all need to think about a lot more within the context of Dao's and also outside of web 3 what are other non-web three entities that Dallas can learn from to be more effective and so now we're going to hop into introductions my name is Madison I'm one of the co-founders of dreamdale and I'm from the US and I'm saf I'm a co-star word of dreamdale and I'm from Vancouver Canada and uh in today's talk I'm going to give you all a brief intro to dreamdow as well as Dao's in general and this will hopefully paint some help paint some contacts on to some of the things that we'll talk about later on in the talk um Madison's going to spark some inspiration with some case studies and then we'll give you an opportunity to share some of your thoughts as well so at dreamtab we trained gen Z to use web3 for good we work with impact-minded Gen Z Youth and I promise you these are some of the brightest kids you'll ever meet um and we equip them with tools and resources to leverage web 3 in creating the impact that they want to create in the world and we do this in three main ways the first of which is through educational sessions um we host a series of talks called the learning together sessions with web 3 leaders um past speakers for for the series have included Aya miyaguchi from EF who you all heard speak yesterday at the opening ceremony as well as Kevin owaki from Bitcoin and we're always looking for speakers um and Educators so if that's if you have a topic on web3 and social impact that you're excited to speak about definitely reach out to us um we also have a one-on-one mentorship program um where we connect our Builders with established mentors in the space and second we also host what we call an explorers program where twice a year we run 12-week internships um uh so just giving our brightest Builders the opportunity to practice what they've learned through our learning together sessions and last but not least we also sponsor Builders to attend IRL Gatherings such as this one so over there um you can see a group of our Builders um who are learning making connections and just making the most of everything that you get out of IRL gatherings and we do all this as a dow we have um yeah we have nfts governance Discord all the things that you would expect from any other Dow because we truly believe in this model the ultimate vision of Dao's promises us better ways to organize humans from our workplaces to our social communities but the truth is we're just scratching the surface of discovering how to optimally structure and operate Dows many processes that are more democratic decentralized Etc may sound good on paper but the truth is they prove to be impractical in practice for one reason or another as a result many Dows are not serving their mission or members as effectively as they could be but the good news is we don't have to reinvent everything we're solving human problems problems that we've grappled with for Millennia often we're too quick to scoff at what we call the web 2 way of doing things um but the truth is that many of these web 2 Solutions exist because they work they've been researched and iterated on for way longer than Dows have been around and we shouldn't shark off their lessons as if we're above them and it's not all Tech either we often get so lost in the latest tooling or the shiny news Frameworks or models that we forget that what coordination comes down to in the end is the human element so we can choose to learn from our past mistakes instead of repeating them and now we'll pass it over to Madison to show us how to do this thank you staff okay now we're going to get into the tangible examples so thank you for staying to that introduction um so the first thing is we're here telling you about like that you should learn from other entities besides web3 Dows um so what have we learned from the first example is civics unplugged which is actually our parent organization so Civics unplugged trains young people to be Civic innovators so basically people who solve Civic and social problems in more innovative ways and it was basically an off-chain Dao before they even knew Dows existed so if you look at some of the design choices here there is an elected steering committee with a treasury that they get to control uh they're the community votes on youth-led projects that they want to fund and there are subgroups that work on responsibilities like social media and international student experience so basically like working groups and so the co-founders of dreamdoll were also really involved in Civics unplugged and were able to take a a lot of the principles and design choices and experiences to inform how we run dreamdoll today okay so the first non-webtree case study is Boy Scouts so if you're from the US you probably know what Boy Scouts is but for those of you who don't the Boy Scouts of America is one of the largest youth organizations in the United States with about 1.2 million youth participants and I think there's a lot to learn from Boy Scouts in terms of recruiting and retaining young people and honestly just people in general the two Core Design choices is the first one is recruitment so the first thing that they do is they recruit from existing values aligned organizations so you can become a Boy Scout I believe it's at 10 years old but they have Cub Scouts for younger boys and so they recruit from that organization and it's a direct pipeline so that's kind of how we at dreamdoll do it we have Civics unplugged as a parent organization and there's a recruitment pipeline but this also applies to dowels who don't have parent organizations or direct affiliations because you can find organizations that are aligned with what you do and have members who wouldn't find your community otherwise so for example at dreamdale we look for non-technical people who are interested in using web3 for good they probably wouldn't find a dow you know without Civics unplugged and so we recruit directly from the fellowship the second part is a strong emphasis on Word of Mouth recruitment I think that Dallas can do a lot better job of emphasizing this piece because what you can do is actually encourage your members to recruit By Word of Mouth but also give them the tools they need to do so give them the tools to share about what the Dao is how they can join and other tools like that because that's one of the biggest methods that boy scouts use to recruit people the second is gamification so for Boy Scouts the the goals are clear the highest level you can achieve is an eagle scout there are a variety of requirements like having a certain number of badges leadership experiences and recommendations and while there may not be a direct equivalent in Dows the principle is still the same make the goals clear and make it clear what people can achieve in your Dao because that makes them want to stay and it gives them something to work towards the second is badges to reward small steps along the way so the Boy Scouts model is actually what directly inspired our Merit system at dreamdo we've developed our our own entire Merit system that we're about to finish in the next month or so but basically the way that we're doing it is on chain Boy Scout badges for the purpose of incentivizing and recognizing activity so basically the problem right now is like when I say I'm a member of dreamdale that doesn't mean much to you because I could be the most involved person or the least involved person but something like merit badges gives context to people internally and externally about what level of involvement a member has so for elections if I'm going to vote for someone I can see how much they've been involved and exactly how they contributed and if I'm putting dream down my resume I get to show that I'm a very involved member okay number two is Parks so I actually haven't heard this really talked about in the context of Dao's so I thought it was a good case study to include but actually public parks are uh the the foundation of public park design and construction is community involvement and gaining consensus so the first part of that is Master plans so every park that is created creates a detailed plan for how the park will be developed and constructed along with how the community is involved in the design process so this serves as a blueprint for others that they can learn from you know like an open source document and at dreamdale we're actually going to be creating a master plan of our own like a 30 page document something like that maybe not that long of all of our governance structures the ones that we've really liked the ones that we see and proven on and some of our other design choices because we believe that for the Dow ecosystem to make some of these strides and how we can better optimize how we can better structure Dows and like ultimately uh just make them function we need to learn from each other's mistakes and documentation is a really powerful way to do that the next is the spokes Council model so this is not exclusive to Parks but a lot of parks use this model essentially the way it works is there are Representatives of different groups so think for Parks like there's a representative from the police department a Boy Scout teachers Etc and these Representatives meet in a larger group to discuss their individual context and make decisions that would be too high level for any one group to decide on their own so the way we do that is dreamdale is we have a dow Council that consists of the leads of each of our working groups so once a month we meet to talk about issues that would be too high level for any one working group to make the best decision about um and the last is existing for users so it's actually really really impressive what parks do to understand and build for their users if you look at some of these Master plans they have like extensive tables about like what are each of the facilities who are the users why do they use them and Parks exists to make sure that the people in the community are enjoying the facility right so they build things specifically based on like if they have like you know the spokes Council what the teacher says that they want uh what the Boy Scout says the needs are for the park and so they exist for the user and every Park is different because of that okay so our last case study is Eco Villages so you may or may not have heard of Eco Villages before but those of you who have not they are small sustainable physical and co-living communities with their own work currency school and more I will say not all of them have their own currency or school or work they all vary a lot but the general principle is they're their own self-sustaining communities in a physical space the first lesson to learn from Eco Villages is their small size so Eco Villages range from 50 to 250 individuals because with any more it's hard to form a strong community and I get very disappointed when I see Dows blindly follow the metric of how many people are in it because if you just think about it logically like if you have 10 000 people that you have a light touch impact on versus 50 people that you have a high touch impact on like what is the better long-term result and so I think what can be learned from Eco Villages is that oftentimes in Eco Villages people depend on each other for survival and so it's important to have a strong sense of community and I think if Dallas also wants to have a strong sense of community they need to learn from that it's important to have a small size okay the second one is work and play so residents of Eco Villages have a lot of formal structure to keep it running because obviously like I said they really depend on each other but they have an equal emphasis on community work and play are interdependent so it's not just a transactional experience of like we're going to make sure that you have food and you have shelter and everything they need to make sure that they have a community and I think it's the same for dolls because without play I think Dows are the 2.0 of web 2 because I mean that's true for a lot of reasons but the main thing is that unlike in web 2 companies people are voluntarily coming to Dallas and don't have a strong reason to say if they don't have a strong sense of community and they don't feel valued in the space the third one is making money so I will say that Eco Villages are still figuring this out too much like Dao's but something that Eco Villages do because often they can't export things because of a lack of resources or physical isolation they profit off of information so some make money off of providing education and consulting services to Outsiders about living in Eco Villages and so similar to Dallas I think if you have not figured out a revenue model outside of Grants like us at dreamdale then and you can't export a product maybe consider information so the master plan that I mentioned earlier that dream now is creating we're considering doing it as a mere post as a way to raise funds for dreamdoll but of course we haven't figured out a superstructured model so would love if you have any ideas after as well but I think the core takeaway from that is like what are some Innovations and information that you can provide as a way to gain revenue for your Dell and we'll close it off with a call to action what are some steps that you can start taking today to encourage a culture of learning and sharing within your teams one look at examples of other Dows in the web 3 space as well as other structures outside of web3 and be open to learning and evolving and two let others learn from you to share and document everything this is so important we can only move forward in this next iteration of the internet and human coordination if we all work on this together and now it's your turn what are some examples and case studies that you know of or even Bolder mistakes that you've made that we can all learn from so open questions well we wanted to ask we wanted to ask the question of like what are some other examples you've learned from that we didn't include [Music] um I was late so I didn't hear like all the talk but more than um more than example I want you to ask like since you've done that the research how do you think that I can create like a community of people that are interested in um in no or learn about blockchain in a college oh in a college yeah interesting students yeah um so I would say um all right so are you are you trying to what kind of people are you trying to Target like what kind of students or just students in general um I mean right now uh it's a software engineer and economic uh students but I want to like Target mainstream people and uh the ones that aren't like into uh speculation and trading to stay right I want people that uh are into the technology not into speculation that makes a lot of sense um so I I don't know if you have something to say but I would say did you see the Boy Scouts example that we gave no I wasn't okay okay yeah so I think the Boy Scouts example is a good one for me to learn from in this case because what Boy Scouts does to recruit people is they have a direct pipeline from an existing organization and that's what we actually do as well so I think the principle there is like if you don't know how to get people to just come to your Club naturally or your community naturally and they wouldn't find the application on their own what you can do is you can find organizations that have the types of people you're targeting and collaborate with them and like a partnership to get people to like your community so like if you're targeting like software Engineers maybe like at a college there's like a technical club for like software Engineers or something like that or if you're targeting non-technical people like we do maybe there's some like social impact oriented clubs that you could talk to and have like and there's like more design choice to talk about from that point of like if you have live conversations or if you just like share information like hey here's the application but I think generally if you're targeting people who you think it might be hard to get them to your community Unity you need to have a lot of one-on-one conversation and Community Building to be like this is not as scary as it sounds and and you can do it and we'll be there to help you yeah no that's great the only thing I would add to that is just like I mean I'm assuming but looking at you you might be a college student who's um interested in blockchain outside of speculation is that right yeah yeah so just like think about what got you interested in the space what what brought you here and like what are some of the things um that you wish you had as in a community that would have um helped you be more excited about this earlier on so yeah just like think about who you're targeting um you know what what's in it for them why why would they be interested in something like this um and yeah just like make it interesting um just think about what would make it interesting for you yeah thank you any other hi uh so I'll share a mistake that I've made in my project so I'm trying to onboard my community to web3 through social and environmental impact and so it consists of Beach cleanups and Dives against debris and different activities like that and to me it made sense so I started organizing on Sundays and the community response was Carlos that's my only day off and why is it at 7 A.M so there's incentives for people to join and it I haven't fully figured out the solution but something that definitely helped was instead of me proposing this thing that made sense to me was okay you tell me what works best for you right and so a lot of them said well I'm down for Friday after work like at Sunset we do something you know so um still trying to gamify it a little bit more and make it more fun so that's just my mistake yeah his beers are involved something that I think is almost impossible to solve is the time zone problem so like we are an International Community with people from like west coast East Coast India Italy Russia that's everywhere right um and so we've had a very hard time and we haven't figured it out like the learning sessions that staff mentioned we did a survey to try and figure out what would be the best time for everyone and there was absolutely no consensus it was like completely spread out and so like what we do is like for important calls we host like multiple like if it's like a really important call we'll host it like two times or something like that but we're really still trying to figure that out I don't know if it can be figured out but yeah we're thinking about that too thank you Carlos anyone else have any I'm coming to you I'm coming thank you thank you for the presentation and congratulations for the project um so uh we've been doing a project in chatomali in Mexico uh it's very interesting to see that you brought up the example of the parks and a couple of years ago like in 2000 uh 2018 19. we tried creating a local Urban daus in the city of chatuman so people could organize themselves and we have a lot of parks there that nobody's using because they're full of drug addicts and trash and uh well we tried teaching people how they can organize and um we what we learned was that we went through the creation phase where we taught people how to do things and we made a big mistake because we were like oh this everything works so we can just leave and you're gonna be fine you know how to organize what we learned was that there is a creation phase and there is a consolidation phase so um well everything stopped the moment we went away from chitamal and now we went back to consolidate what we are doing so this was our mistake that's why I wanted to share it and now we are taking a five-year trip in a school bus throughout Latin America to teach local people how to use web3 tools and we are taking care of the creation phase and of the consolidation phase so I just wanted to share this and yeah congratulations again thank you for sharing I want to ask follow a question what did you mean by you stopped I don't think I understood uh we had to go away so we went we moved to Europe from Mexico for um master degree and the people were like they they just got overwhelmed and everything stopped that makes sense thank you so much for sharing anybody else want to share if not we have one more Chris one of our fearless leaders hi um I guess I just have one question I think like being in the space one thing I've always noticed is that several Dows goes through different leaders coming in and out different community members coming in and out so how do you uh sort of one think ahead of that situation and make sure like the thou can sustain uh without people you know leaving immediately uh so like what are the things you're doing to kind of like get ahead of that or make sure like you have a solid foundation yep I think that's a great question I think two things that come to mind for me is one information and then two just making people feel like they are able to step up so on the information point I mentioned the master plan that we're going to be creating of like all of our governance structures and how the Dow works that will be useful to people inside the Dell but also people outside the dough so there's never any questions about like okay how do we I don't know onboard our mentors or something like that someone can always pick up the process because it's open source and the second is even if you do have the right structures for like elections and like a system that makes sense if you don't have people who feel like they can step up that's not going to work and so what we try to do is embed leadership opportunities into every part of the Dow so the example for that us would be we have working groups and they're all led by young people so we have a Roth who leads our community working group and Joshua who leads our gallery working group and we have a couple others as well so and that also applies to like smaller opportunities like bounties so people can like take bounties at any point and So eventually we could see ourselves doing a structure where we have one of our Builders be elected to leave with one of our mentors lead the Dow and so that's only going to be the case though if they feel comfortable and they have the experience and so we're baking those experiences into every level of the Dow okay amazing thank you anybody else have anything to share about their Dow experiences oh I'm coming maybe maybe a way to get Revenue would be to make like the digital digital twin meaning a Dao of current uh organizations like the one it's your apartment company so if you develop the knowledge not only the information but the knowledge and kind of do the design implementation for another organization that would be kind of some some Revenue yeah like are you saying like providing some knowledge on like some of the things that we've learned to other organizations who are like wanting to start a Dell from the normal world like uh like Boy Scouts like like going to all these places and developing the digital twin yeah like so helping organizations start their dial yeah I think that that's an interesting concept what do you think about that stuff yeah I mean I think this is uh I was too concentrated on my own portions of the talks I wasn't paying attention to but um I think you mentioned right at the end like we're working on a uh A playbook um for for Dows that kind of like includes all the learnings from um how we built dreamdo um and one of the thoughts that we were just talking about this morning literally as we were thinking about this talk um is uh like how um how can we sort of like monetize that or make that a um so we were thinking we could publish such a Playbook on mirror which is sort of like this decentralized publishing platform um that uh allows it so that anyone can see we don't want to like um token gate or like we want to like make sure like these learnings are truly open source but um people can choose to then donate and like buy additions of this Playbook um if they feel like they've gotten value out of it um so yeah that's one way that we're looking at um at monetizing the work that we're doing that's great and that's monetizing the information but maybe doing a further like helping them to build it would be another way and you will be helping to build valuable things yeah absolutely kind of like a Consulting service yeah okay yeah thank you