WHAT IS DAO ? HOW TO DAO ON HARMONY

Some words are overused. "Paradigm Shift" tends to be a phrase that get's tossed around in today's Silicon Valley / Disruption Focused / "Who can I disintermediate?" world.  

That being said - there is a real paradigm shift happening. The shift from traditional work and career trajectory towards a more flexible, more open form of employment. People who are comfortable in one...may not be comfortable in the other.

The DAO is unlocking this new way of working. But what is a "DAO"? And how do DAOs actually work?

It is important not only to understand the tools that you have to make the DAO work - but also to truly build a new mental framework and break free from the thinking of prior generations. 

Historically, someone would offer you a job and then tell you what to do. You reported up a tree. Your work product, your productivity, your value add to the downstream product was diluted as it passed through layer after layer of management and people justifying their roles.

DAOs are fundamentally different. They are a collection of people together working to further a common goal. There are no managers. 

But this map 👆— it's not a map of flat, DAO-derived coordination. It's a map of viral infection in a population. And THAT'S the point. DAOs have the potential for viral growth and dominance.

DAOs will go through several stages of life. They need a little bit of centralization as they get bootstrapped and kickstarted, but once they have a clear mandate, set up their treasury / voting / participation tools, they are ready to turn over the controls to the community. 

But not all DAOs need to live forever. If a DAO has a clear mandate that is time bound — say to launch a particular product or to participate in a specific event — the best course of action is for the DAO to disintegrate and cease to be.

Given this new model - there will be significant exploration that will happen around how it will actually work and how can these DAOs get funded so they have sufficient runway to survive the early turbulence.

Harmony has set aside $10M USD to fund several DAOs that are central to the Harmony project. The goal of those DAOs is to decentralize the Harmony Foundation and move the governance and management from the hands of the Core Team into the hands of the Community. 

But there are several community spawned DAOs as well - that were launched, funded and are managed through community involvement.

For DAOs that are community sourced but are also interested in receiving some bootstrap or kickstarting funds from Harmony, we look at Four different considerations that we view as "table stakes" for consideration. A clear mandate. Proper DAO formation. Clear plans for election and governor rotation. A firm understanding of how fluid and porous DAOs actually are.

But we aren't simply stopping at our main 10 DAOs or relying 100% on the community to bring more to fruition. We are leveraging our Hackathons to generate additional DAO formation. After all, DAOs mean Community. And Community means traction — and we like to support projects gaining traction.

 

It's always vital to remember that we are very early in the deployment and use of DAOs. It is still "Day One" - a term popularized by early Amazon. 

We need to focus on long-term planning. We need to keep our eyes on what really matters - the people. They are our customers, our users - this is our community. And we must stay bold and fearless and continue to innovate.

Three main attributes we all need to keep in mind: Curiosity, Nimbleness and a tendency towards experimentation.