You're reading State of the DAOs, the high-signal low-noise newsletter for understanding DAOs.
Audience: Have made the jump into a DAO or want to make jump, but are looking for help on how to get started. Curating high quality content from prominent DAOs for understanding and getting a handle on the DAO ecosystem. Goal to move reader from newbie to an active, engaged member.
If you were asked what a DAO is, you probably would simply recite what each words in the acronym stands for, but is that a full capture of the concept behind these organizations and how they operate? Due to the several forms in which DAOs are structured, it's not a surprise that it may be quite difficult to have a clear definition of what a DAO is and what we're working towards.
But as HiroKennelly writes, "regardless of what a DAO is, they are all built using the same dozen or so building blocks of digital organizations, many of which are akin to social legos". This issue’s editorial delves more into these foundational blocks as the author taps into years of DAO experience to introduce us to the 10 C's of DAOs.
As usual, we also feature latest news and updates in the DAO ecosystem. From VitaDAO's latest biotech spinout to governance and social security issues in web3, this issue is fully packed to help you cut through the noise and get up to speed on the current state of the DAOs.
Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Quilia, Warrior, ab_colours, Vi-Fi, Boluwatife, Kornekt, trewkat, siddhearta, HiroKennelly)
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Author: HiroKennelly
Image Credit: ab_colours
Although DAOs have been around for seven years, they are still pretty hard to define. The term ‘decentralized autonomous organization’ does very little to describe what they are, what they do, or how they do it. Even those of us who work and play in DAOs for hours each day have a really hard time describing just what it is we are doing and how we are DAOing it.
Is decentralization a reference to the technology, the people, the workstreams, the org structure, or the ownership distribution?
Is the decentralized organization autonomous because it historically has not been part of a regulatory or statutory regime, because of the idea that decisions are entirely left to onchain votes and executed by smart contracts, or because these entities enable maximum agency so that people can contribute as they see fit?