OrgTech Review #17
Introducing OrgTech Network and OrgTech-Fr!
This is a longer issue because it has been a while since our last and August was a rather busy month for DAOs. Before we dive in, we're excited to introduce OrgTech-Fr, a hub for the French-speaking OrgTech community, with original content, curated news, local events, and more! As our first community hub, OrgTech-Fr is effectively helping to soft-launch OrgTech Network, an initiative Jack has been dreaming up since he started OrgTech Review. OrgTech Network is a networked organization that will provide products and services to accelerate the widespread adoption of OrgTech and DAOs. Our first product is, of course, OrgTech Review, but we have a lot more ideas cooking up, and we're on the lookout for like-minded OrgTech-savvy individuals to help make these a reality. If you'd like to get involved, drop us a line or fill in the form on the website. We hope this issue was worth the wait and we can't wait to engage more with you all!
This issue was brought to you by Jack Laing, Theo Beutel, and Phil Honigman.
Previously on OrgTech Review
Most clicked:What is a DAO?, Resolving the Stake-Based vs. Participant-Based Voting Dilemma, How to Create a Thriving Global Commons Economy.
Project News
Aragon
Aragon 0.8 “Camino” Launched. Featuring the release of Aragon Agent (enabling DAOs to interact with other Ethereum applications), new pre-set templates for creating organisations, redesigned Voting, Permissions, and Finance apps, email notifications, and a new design system.
Implementing DAOstack’s Holographic Consensus in an Aragon App. This two-part tutorial (part 1, part 2, GitHub) deployed a "HCVoting" app, with future parts extending its functionality.
The Road to Futarchy. An extensive update on the roadmap of Level K, an Aragon Nest grantee, including an oracle framework, signalling markets, UI optimizations, permissionless market funding, vote delegation and automated markets.
Introducing 3Box Profiles in Aragon. As part of this experimental release, members of Aragon DAOs can choose to display an avatar, cover photo, name, bio, website, location as well as their education and work history.
Smart Contract Based IPFS Storage for DAOs, allowing Aragon DAOs to save user and application data without having to devote time and resources to setting up IPFS nodes themselves.
Daolist is now Apiary, an Aragon DAO Explorer, with plans to extend its functionality.
Launching the Melon Council DAO on aragonOS. The Melon Technical Council members announced that they have transferred the ownership of Melon to the Melon Council DAO on aragonOS. While Melon's financial resources are not yet at the disposal of the DAO, the protocol's governance votes are now held on-chain according to the Melon Governance System.
Common court with Kleros proposal. An extensive discussion among Kleros, Aragon and other community members on building a court system. Among other things, the thread touches on inter-DAO dynamics, network effects, token economics, open source ethos and community values.
Aragon Association 2019 mid-year report. On behalf of the Aragon Network, the Association covers legal, operations, treasury management, events, communications as well as the management of Flock teams and Nest projects. Upcoming work packages of the Association include further decentralizing the governance of the Aragon Network, refining the transparency framework and planning AraCon 2020.
The Aragon One thesis. The team behind Aragon One shares their vision for Aragon and what it means when "humans can now experiment with governance at the speed of software".
Autark / Open Works Labs - July 2019 Update. The Flock team continued their work on AGP-19 and finished three out of seven work packages, namely 'Rewards Application and Open Enterprise', 'Data Storage and Standards' and 'Rich User Profiles', an identity solution with a 3Box integration.
Aragon One Podcast In Flight, Episode "The human side of Aragon One". Monica Zeng, head of HR at Aragon One, shares her experience of assembling the Aragon One team.
Aragon One Podcast In Flight, Episode "Leading a short-lived organization". Stefano Bernardi and Louis Giraux from the Aragon Association join hosts (and Aragon co-founders) Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo to discuss the role of the Association and its "surprising goal of making itself irrelevant".
Colony
Glider, the first release of Colony, has been live since the beginning of the summer, and now the Dapp is being rolled out to select users. Get in touch with the team to request early access.
The Colony Dapp is now open source, under GPL v3. Clone it!
Podcast: Auryn Macmillan was on DAOcast on July 22nd to discuss the launch of Glider. The conversation also covers how Colony organizations might integrate with other DAOs running on different frameworks such as Aragon or DAOstack.
Commons Stack
Computer-Aided Governance (CAG) — A Revolution in Automated Decision-Support Systems. Jeff Emmet and Michael Zargham introduce "Computer-Aided Governance", whose goal is to improve our current governance systems by creating tools to model and test policy outcomes, so that participants have better information and make the best possible decisions. The article does a great job at explaining why it is needed, how it can be done, and what society can gain from it.
The Commons Stack: Scaling the Commons to Re-Prioritize People and the Planet [a transcript of the Token Engineering Global Gathering (TEGG) talk in Berlin]. This is a transcript of Jeff Emmet's talk at Token Engineering Global Gathering (TEGG) in Berlin, where Jeff sets out the rationale for building the Commons Stack, an open-source library of blockchain-based components to enable community-driven economies to raise funding, make decisions, allocate capital and measure impact.
DAOstack
The dxDAO passed its first proposal, to buy the dxdao.eth ENS domain which has now been transferred.
The General Store. Featured in a local newspaper, this DAOstack-based DAO enables its members to govern a physical space in Minneapolis, which is used for coworking, events, retail and more.
dHack runs 'decentralized hackathon' at ETHBerlin, winners revealed. Projects include "My DAO Dashboard", allowing to manage all DAOs associated with a given Ethereum address, "Mapcovery", a location-based wallet recovery mechanism and "DAOhaus", listing Moloch DAO and its forks.
Genesis - Let's Talk about Rep. A thorough discussion on how reputation is currently distributed in DAOstack's Genesis DAO - and how that should change as part of the next version, Genesis Beta/1.0.
DAOs in Action. DAOstack highlights a few projects that have recently been funded by the Genesis DAO, including dOrg’s LL-DAO project, an Alchemy mobile app, and ETHIndia's dHack.
Introduction to DAOstack and playing with Hacker-kit - Cheese Wizards + CoinList Hackathon. DAOstack's open source dev relations manager provides a tutorial on hacking with DAOstack.
Democracy Earth
Democracy Earth receives a $228k R&D grant to further develop Machine Learning-resistant Turing Tests that can be used as proofs of identity.
ditCraft
Recording of ditCraft presentation at Berlin Ethereum Meetup. In his 40 minute-presentation, Sebastian Gajek explains at length how ditCraft, ditCLI and ditExplorer work together to provide a decentralized alternative to git.
Recent releases include introducing git commands in the ditCLI client and a new ditExplorer which lets you create GitHub repositories directly from the start-page.
GovBlocks
This is one we missed in our previous issues. GovBlocks launched on the Ethereum main-net alongside Nexus Mutual on May 24th 2019. They are taking a pragmatic approach to governance, with a focus on modularity and the perspective that it's okay to start with relatively centralized governance if you have a vision for becoming decentralized.
Jur
Jur migrated to the VeChain blockchain and conducted an IEO on the OceanEx Exchange, which was oversubscribed at over $10M. Check out the new whitepaper here.
MetaCartel DAO
MetaCartel DAO Wave 1 Funding, including web app frontend for MetaCartel DAO that works without MetaMask using the Abridged SDK, research on supporting reputation through NFTs, as well as Orochi DAO, an event management-DAO by Kickback with an initial test event at DevCon5 in Osaka.
Moloch DAO
Moloch Pool launched, making it possible to donate to the DAO without becoming a voting member.
Introducing “OrochiDAO” and “The year of DAOs” event. A fork of Moloch designed to manage event sponsorships, starting with a DAO celebration at DevCon5.
Rise of the YangDAO. A fork of Moloch designed to coordinate supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and enable them to collectively fund memes.
DAOHaus Bauhaus. The team behind the mobile-first Moloch frontend hacked together a dashboard that will make it easier to find and create Moloch DAOs. They aim to scale this project into a DAO social network that integrates with other DAO frameworks.
Check out other Moloch hackathon projects here, including a vote selling tool and a Nexus Mutual integration.
Nexus Mutual
As with the GovBlocks news above, we mistakenly overlooked this one in our previous issues. Nexus Mutual is an insurance platform that provides smart contract cover. They pioneered the notion of defining DAOs legally as membership corporations known as "digital cooperatives" (work we featured in our 12th issue). They are now live, linked to a legal entity in the UK, and the mutual pool is being actively governed by members. See more details on how it works here, check out their governance portal here, and listen to a podcast with their founder here.
Opolis
Opolis Off-White Paper – The Employment Commons. Opolis is a framework for self-sovereign workers that aims to resolve the legal challenges of DAOs, using "Decentralized Employment Organizations (DEOs)", aka employment cooperatives, which will be legally defined as Colorado-based Limited Cooperative Associations. The goal is that workers just need to join one DEO, through which they can participate in any DAO, because their DEO will receive all of their DAO work payments and take care of legal and tax compliance. Opolis is currently preparing a closed beta test and plans to launch its first public MVP in Q4 2019.
The DAO [2]
Ryan Zurrer, Director at Web3 Foundation, moves on to revive 'The DAO'. The former partner at Polychain Capital announced on Twitter that he will be gradually off-boarding from Web3 Foundation until the end of this year to explore the "dream of a sustainable decentralized organization". In the midst of what "feels like a DAO renaissance", Zurrer called it "the most compelling project" at this time. The daily activities of this Aragon-based DAO will be managed by "leagues": sub-DAOs (departments) who can coordinate using SourceCred-based reputation and will specialize in different functions of venture capital. For example, three of these leagues (Treasury, Venture, and Compliance) will own a multi-sig that has the sole authority to execute payments. DAO members, who can buy in and out of the DAO via a bonding curve, will have the power to approve any mandates proposed by leagues and to remove malicious leagues. Check out the whitepaper here.
Why Ryan Zurrer Would Like to See a New DAO - Unconfirmed Podcast. Laura Shin hosts Zurrer to discuss how today's tools can improve upon The DAO [1], how The DAO [1] could have helped temper the ICO craze, and how Zurrer thinks his approach relates to U.S. securities law.
The DAOfund
The DAOfund. Building upon the notion of fractal DAOs and the increased interest in for-profit investment DAO models, DAOfund follows a three-layer architecture, including a contributor DAO, a fund manager DAO, and one or more venture DAOs, and will eventually use bonding curves to enable automated market making.
UniDAO
UniDAO, an investment DAO with DeFi integrations. After successfully experimenting with Agent and Frame to interact with Uniswap and Compound, this Aragon-based DAO aims to scale up and leverage the full range of investment opportunities in the DeFi ecosystem. Draft whitepaper here.
Brain Food
5 Trends Appear on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2019. When you hear of the word "DAO", do you still think of the 2016 hack? Time to take another look: according to the Gartner Hype Cycle, DAOs are among "the 29 emerging technologies CIOs should experiment with over the next year".
Cells As Firms. Simon de la Rouviere explores biomimetics applied to the theory of the firm, essentially by comparing firms to biological cells. The metaphor goes deep, from genetic material to metabolism to gene transfers. The metaphor may provide insights regarding strategic decisions, such as when to split or merge firms, or what should be in-house vs. what should be outsourced.
Incomplete Contracts (and Scaling Crypto). Jesse Walden of a16z distinguishes deterministic "complete" crypto projects from complex "incomplete" ones, which require dynamic and subjective judgements to withstand uncertain or adversarial conditions. While the crypto space is born out of deterministic machines (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum), most interesting projects today are incomplete. While incomplete projects can still leverage the complete machine layer to coordinate ownership and deterministic governance processes (e.g. triggering bounties or transferring funds), the key differentiator may be how well they build models for organizing effectively at scale.
Why Do Public Blockchains Need Formal and Effective Internal Governance Mechanisms?. This paper offers a critical examination of the ability of public blockchains to establish social coordination between strangers, de facto replacing or playing the role of a modern legal system. Drawing on Hart's concept of law, the authors argue that public blockchains lack essential elements of governance, and as a consequence they are doomed to suffer from constant forking, ossification, and instability.
Are DAOs beta-doomed?. Pepo references a tweetstorm by Andrew Certain, a 20-year Amazon veteran who emphasizes the unscalability of distributed systems in which communication is established between every agent ("beta" being the coefficient that models the negative return of additional agents). Pepo's tweet sparks a discussion about DAO scalability that touches on DAOstack's holographic consensus and mesh DAOs.
Becoming Decentralized Enough: The Case For DAOs. DeFi protocols will eventually arrive at a crossroad where they either delegate all control to a DAO or turn into centralized businesses that offer non-custodial financial services. The article analyses how DAOs can benefit from DeFi protocols, zooming in on Maker and Uniswap.
Values-based DAOs. Eric Arsenault raises the question of how to prevent the founding values of DAOs from being compromised over time. Possible solutions centre around preventing outside investors from accumulating influence that outweighs the voices of core members. The conversation continues on DAOtalk.
Towards Complex Governance Systems. Phoebe Tickell shares her views on DGOV, a community of practice created to further innovation in distributed and participatory governance. DGOV acknowledges the potential of technology, but puts culture and complex systems thinking first.
Proposal making in DAOs: the limitations of “Anyone Proposes Anything”. Grace Rachmany questions the ability of current DAO frameworks to differentiate relatively non-impactful "just go ahead" decisions from those that affect many stakeholders. She uses the opportunity to enumerate a number of collective decision-making mechanisms that can be used for these different types of decisions.
I want to live in a DAO. Could we revive the Kibbutz, a traditional Israeli institution of collective communities, using DAOs as a way to tie together a local community with its value flow and governance system?
Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life: A brief introduction to DisCOs. Stacco Troncoso introduces DisCO, distributed cooperative organizations, a cooperative alternative to DAOs. DisCOs are based on 4 fundamental tenets: Commons/P2P, Open Coops, Open Value Accounting, and Feminist Economics. They combine a cultural and legal approach to a (future) tech stack using distributed computing and public blockchains.
Social Networking in 2030: How Could Crypto Change Things?. Chris Dixon of a16z discusses how crypto and blockchains could solve social networks and internet platforms' flaws relating to privacy and inequality of value distribution, by leveraging token network effects, community-controlled governance, and open data marketplaces.
Events
19-23 September - DGOV Retreat (Slovenia)
6 October - The year of DAOs (Osaka)
11 October - Dream DAO Party - DAICO Edition (Osaka)