Welcome to the How to DAO course! We will be 100 people from across the globe tuning in live for 2 hours every Wednesday 4pm-6pm UK time, starting 22nd Sep.
If you haven't already, please join the How to DAO Discord via
A reminder: You will be sent prep tasks at least a few days before each session (allow 1 hour), and homework at the end of each session (allow 1 hour). To get the most out of the course you should also set aside at least 2 hours per session to go back through the notes, read some of the links provided and make sure you've understood everything we've covered. So that's a minimum of 6 hours per session for maximum benefit (1 hour prep, 2 hours live, 2 hours revision, 1 hour homework).
The first hour of the live sessions will be used to underline some of the key points from the preparatory reading/watching, as a tour of the rest of the notes from the session, and sometimes to give live, on-chain walkthroughs of certain tasks. The second hour will feature presentations followed by Q&A with a number of experts from the DAO space.
For this first session, my approach is to provide you with a 'map of the territory' along with a ton of high quality content, and then leave it up to you to pick which areas you want to go into deeper. We won't have time to cover everything in detail. I suggest you use the 2 hours revision time to read more about anything you found particularly challenging or interesting.
OK, here's the prep for the first session:
Let's generate some excitement by starting with this pair of high-rhetoric/high-production value/low-on-specifics videos from the first DAO hype wave in 2018:
) is the cofounder and president of Democracy Earth, a non-profit organisation backed by Y Combinator that is behind the UBI Universal Basic Income token on Ethereum and the Proof of Humanity protocol. He is also Executive Director of DAO Education and the author of Hacktivismo, published 2015 by Random House.
Formal standards: Rules that are codified by certain parties/rules about how parties are supposed to act, and/or
Social conventions: A regularity followed by people belonging to a group/a shared expectation of the correct way to behave
(It seems to me this isn't really a binary, it's more a spectrum of formality. What's important is that there's communication and agreement on rules/conventions.)
"Things are easy to solve from a god’s-eye-view, so if everyone comes together into a superorganism, that superorganism can solve problems with ease and finesse."
"The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanism. Many other things besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.
For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions, jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example, against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them.
But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you).
Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions [that aren't governments] that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives."
"If only there was a technology that allowed groups of humans to choose to easily coordinate with one another! A transparent substrate for trust games where everyone knows where they stand and whose rules can’t be changed on you.
My belief is that this is the ultimate legacy of Ethereum [/smart contracts]. We can now program our values into our economic system—the final form of a stateful internet could allow us to coordinate the actions of multiple economic actors and therefore could solve coordination failures."
Where we're going with this: DAOhaus DAOs (and other no-code DAO platforms) provide crystal-clear (cryptographic) expectations of what the 'rules of the game' are, such that they enable and encourage a higher standard of coordination/co-operation.
No-code DAO platforms have the potential to act as a Schelling point for 'co-operating with money', effectively standardising what it means to be a multi-stakeholder co-op and massively reducing the cost/friction of both inter-organisation collaboration, and participants switching between organisations.
Session 1
