Some excellent feedback from Patrick Rawson:
As mentioned before I don’t owning tokens should be the only means of becoming a member. There’s two reasons:
(1) If you guys are going the route of unincorporated partnership, this broadens the definition of DAO members so widely as to include persons or entities that are problematic from the state’s perspective. This may be an issue for future regulators: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/130581/is-there-any-way-to-form-an-anonymous-general-partnership
(2) Token holding is not a good criteria for full governance rights. There is no guarantee that token holders will provide good governance. Often they do not, as they are biased towards profits. I believe a whitelist of token holders with the power to engage in governance is the best solution here, with some merit-based or contribution-based criteria for the whitelist.
Some other types of contributions (maybe “work” covers them, but I find it useful to specify a broadened definition of work to better capture the wide range of possible contributions):
- intellectual capital (e.g. patents / IP)
- cultural capital (e.g. an intern self-educating with the future intent of becoming a worker)
- material capital (e.g. an office-space)
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WGs should be compensated as their attention is valuable. You will lack quality working groups if you do not compensate professionals for their time.
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Cash should be more specifically defined here – I am assuming you mean stablecoins or high quality liquid crypto-assets (e.g. ETH).
I suspect no bank will extend an account to a DAO for cash/fiat payments.
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Keep in mind that if this is the design objective, you need to ask yourself: "What do we need to do to populate each working group with a combination of people who are:
- well-reasoned and scientific
- level-headed
- willing to engage
You will need curation methods for each of these things. The biggest red flag I’m seeing here is you are not compensating WG members. You will not satisfy conditions (1) and (3) if you do not create incentives for scientific professionals to engage. Relying on volunteerism for professional, high functional roles is not a viable business model.
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Regarding token holders being primary governors of DAO:
This is, in most cases, a dysfunctional system, and the most common failure mode for DAOs. Let me explain:
The average person does not have the bandwidth or the professional expertise to participate in all decisions in an organization. Due to this “organizational law” of sorts, every organization solidifies a core of highly engaged persons who are usually executives who take responsibility for high frequency, day to day decisions. The design trade-off is clear: political decentralization vs. practicality.
I discuss this at length in the Kolektivo whitepaper starting at section 2.3.4, and I recommend you read about these trade-offs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xBBCJTAES650Qy8PVII3qZIQkMnrrIYQbxM5t9L0Zfk/edit?usp=sharing
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We are working on something similar flow here that breaks down the process into multiple parts:
(1) whitelisted person submits proposal (this is what we aim to develop)
(2) governance process (e.g. SnapSafe, conviction voting)
(3) executive “executes” the proposal (non-execution is considered a form of executive veto; some sort of override function is possibly needed, or snap elections if this happens)
(4) a time delay allows for the proposal to be contested and undergo some arbitration process (this is on Gnosis’ roadmap as well)
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WGs should be able to structure their entry/join conditions freely without top-down enforcement.
Keep in mind: all it takes is one irritating or totalitarian personality to diminish the productivity / insights of an entire group and kill its morale / momentum in perpetuity.
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I’m not sure how useful it is to frame the contrast here between a core and SPs. If we take seriously the idea that work == ownership, similar to a cooperative, then SPs ultimately are more “core members” than those attributed with such a title.
Let’s imagine that this scenario plays out as you’ve designed, and you end up with a supermanagerial “core” that is engaging and contracting SPs. They’ve essentially only taken over the work of creating and issuing requirements, and are acting as a sort of procurement officer. This isn’t, in my opinion, the Web3 ideal: both the SPs and the core are providing “proofs-of-(literal)-work” and should be recognized as such, without any hierarchical delimitation.
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On the admin role:
On the legal side, in the event of any regulatory intervention, these admins will likely be targeted under the “nearest person principle”: https://chainstrategies.com/2018/03/11/malta-blockchain-regulation-proposal-legal-personality-for-daos-and-smart-contracts/