OrgTech Review #11

May 12, 2019

Previously on OrgTech Review

Most clicked: Colony Q2 2019 Update, a thread on conflict facilitation in light of the MakerDAO turmoil, oscoin applications for user testing.

Aragon vote shows the perils of onchain governance. Evan Van Ness points out that one whale was able to flip three controversial votes at the last minute. Interesting discussions (including the Aragon One team) in this Twitter thread.
The Rise of Smart Organizations. John Light (Aragon One Comms) writes an overview of the DAO (or "Smart Organization") concept, examples of use cases, and Aragon's work making DAOs a reality. Find on Page 98 of this zine.
Aragon Black launched their blog. "The main purpose of our blog is not to present our team or our project. Every month will be published the Black Monthly: a collection of texts, analyses, interviews, meetings around a specific theme." The first post revisits Aragon's whitepaper and manifesto and reflects on the nature of manifestos.
All Aragon Devs call notes now available in the Aragon Wiki.

Gnosis Ecosystem Fund Update II. Gnosis have awarded the dOrg team with a $30,000 grant to work on giving DAOstack DAOs (including Gnosis' dxDAO) the ability to launch and interact with token bonding curves.

Introducing Humanity DAO. An experiment in unique identity, governance, and Universal Basic Income. The DAO will maintain a registry of unique identities, which will unlock new identity-reliant governance capabilities such as democratic voting.

Forking MolochDAO. The MetaCartel's new DAO aims to "bootstrap an environment that could enable data network effects". The DAO will fund dapps based on their end-user success metrics such as revenue, user retention, and product growth. To incentivise data sharing, participating projects won't receive their grants until they have shared their data.

Moloch DAO just received 1,000 ETH in membership commitments each from the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, Vitalik Buterin, and Joseph Lubin.

Blockchains are Bureaucracies par Excellence: Blockchains automate bureaucracy by replacing human administrators with “middlemachines". By formalising coordination rules and procedures, they help to power global systems that are seemingly less fettered by individual preference, subjective human judgement, or personal authority. However, we should be wary of their potential to become dehumanised “silicon cages” that could end up seriously hindering our freedom and creativity.
Governance FTW! Episode 1: State of Ethereum governance: A roundtable discussion of insights generated during a governance workshop by the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (COALA).
Dumb on Purpose - A Behavioral Criticism of Meritocracy: Meritocracy incentivises people to pursue ideas they know are bad, but which will also earn them rewards. The solution is to 1) measure merit more accurately, and/or 2) decouple rewards from measured accomplishment.

Platforms for a Post-Industrial Civilization - Complexity as a case for boundaryless organizing: The boundaryless organisation is not separated from the system it is helping organize (e.g. Airbnb organizing the hospitality market), it IS the system. Rather than focusing on identifying problems and solutions, boundaryless organisations will be ecosystems that take advantage of complexity and scale to allow solutions to emerge organically.
Radical Autonomy at Scale: The case of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare company that has managed to scale 15,000 employees despite being fully autonomous, by operating a "network of teams" org structure: "Every time a team gets to 12 nurses, they split. The two newly formed teams grow until they reach that magic number before splitting again. This allows the organization to grow exponentially without damaging quality, satisfaction and cost levels."
When Workers Control the Code: Wired profiles "platform cooperative" Up & Go, a house-cleaning sharing economy platform governed by its cleaners.