This article understands the classification of common DAO tools and the importance of community cohesion

Reposted from official account: old yuppie

1. Write in front

One of the first blockchain trends to gain traction was the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Vitalik Buterin first wrote about them in 2014, before Ethereum launched in 2015. After a five-year lull since the DAO hack, The DAO is back in the spotlight, due in part to developments in blockchain infrastructure and the growth of DeFi and NFTs.

Today, according to analytics tool Deep DAO, there are more than 100 DAOs with 715,000 members managing $11 billion in assets and growing rapidly. Setting up new DAOs is becoming easier, especially after the advent of tools like Gnosis Safe and Discord, which - when combined - allow anyone in the world to create a community with common ownership of capital (like a treasury) , and collectively and trustlessly decide the allocation of its funds.

However, DAOs still face many challenges that must be addressed in order to form resilient communities. As DAOs grow larger and more distributed over time, it becomes more difficult to effectively organize team work, track accountability, measure contributions, and keep participants equally committed and motivated.

After an overview of the current DAO tooling landscape, I will analyze some of the most important issues of DAO governance and share my thoughts on the future.I will also explain why the most effective instrumentation will be built on enhancing community interaction, coordination, and connection—thus prioritizing social cohesion.

2.DAO tool landscape

Traditional organizations use bank accounts to manage money and use numerous enterprise software solutions to coordinate effectively (e.g. Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Asana, DocuSign). Likewise, various tools have emerged to address different aspects of DAO governance and ensure the good functioning of the community.

Below are some DAO tools that I have come across through personal experience and research.

2.1. The most popular

Alchemy - Blockchain developer platform that facilitates the creation of new applications and tools

Aragon - Operating system for DAO applications

Boardroom - Integrated governance and communications management portal to aid decision making

Collab.Land - System for creating group chats controlled by tokens

Colony - DAO infrastructure for reputation-based task management and dispute resolution

Deep DAO - DAO analysis and information collection

Discord - Messaging application primarily for synchronous conversations between community members

Discourse - Forum for asynchronous advice and conversation, heavily used in governance

Gnosis Safe - Multi-signature wallet for pooling and managing funds

Llama - Financial data provider for financial reporting, asset allocation, budget planning and fiscal policy

Mirror - Publishing platform with a suite of crypto-native tools

Rabbithole - App that allows you to earn rewards for using cryptocurrency apps and educating yourself about the space

Sablier Finance - continuous and autonomous payroll management

Snapshot - Token-based voting platform where off-chain governance decisions are made

Tally - Dashboard to track and analyze on-chain governance information

2.2. Need attention

Comity Labs - Platform to Fund, Engage and Inspire the Community

Coordinape - Coordination game to identify and reward the most valuable contributors

Garnet - App to coordinate and engage with your community

Kleros - Arbitration service for fair adjudication of blockchain-based disputes

Multis - A multi-signature wallet designed for organizations

Orca Protocol - Open source community management tool

Parcel - Simplified financial management product built on top of Gnosis Safe

PartyBid - App for collective bidding on NFTs and split ownership

Radicle - A peer-to-peer stack for code collaboration

SourceCred - Tool for the community to measure and reward value creation

Superfluid - Fund Flow and Reward Distribution Protocol

Sybil - Platform to find potential delegates and track their votes

Syndicate Protocol - Decentralized investment protocol and social network

Tribute - DAO architectural framework with upgradable and modular design

XMTP--encrypted currency native communication protocol

If you're a visual learner, here's a great visualization of the DAO infrastructure stack by function.

While many tools have emerged to facilitate the creation and management of DAOs, there are still a number of important challenges to be addressed that are similar to those faced by traditional organizational or political systems. To gain traction and resilience, DAOs will need better tools to support their tight-knit communities.

3.1. The dilemma of DAO

DAOs are sometimes difficult to coordinate, and these coordination costs have been a growing pain. As more experiments took place, a large tradeoff emerged. DAOs live on a spectrum between organization and decentralization.

The DAO dilemma is the reason most projects start with centralized governance - there are many decisions to make at the beginning. Then, once a solid community is formed, and some sort of market fit for the DAO is found, some projects choose to decentralize over time. This is called "progressive decentralization".

While most DAOs try to improve this trade-off by creating smaller working groups or core units to divide tasks more clearly and efficiently, much of the activity and conversation between members still happens on web2 tools such as GitHub, Discord , Discourse and Twitter. As a member of several DAOs, I found it very time-consuming to navigate the platforms and understand where I could provide the most value.

While curators can help by pointing participants in the right direction, better social and organizational tools are needed to improve community interaction, information flow, and social cohesion. For example, according to the Orca protocol, pods -- "organizations composed of a fixed number of member tokens, each representing a voting right" -- would be a great starting point for further improvements in project governance and community management.

3.2. Governance and Accountability

When studying the governance of politics and business, three things are clear.

1. When there are too many people in command, there is little consensus.

2. Certain decisions require specialization because not all members are best suited to make them.

3. The average user of a product/service doesn't want to manage what they're using; they just want it to work.

Empowerment has become a tool to pass on responsibility to more qualified and active members within these organizations. This system helps eliminate voter fatigue and improves decision quality and execution.

But with that comes accountability. Delegates want to ensure that their representatives align with what they believe in, and that their actions reflect this. Tracking and managing "protocol politicians" is extremely important to the resilience of a project and its community (many existing political systems are built on these principles, such as representative democracies in the US or UK).

Other tools have also been created to incentivize smaller token holders to vote, such as the one released by Andre Cronje (founder of Yearn Finance), which allows DeFi protocols to offer token rewards to ve CRV holders in exchange for Their votes effectively bribe them to achieve a larger CRV reward distribution and higher user yield. These new forms of "ticket buying" could be exploited by dangerous attackers - a complex problem for current token governance systems to address.

Communities need better tools to assess the accountability of individual actors with positions of power within them, put proper checks and balances in place, and go beyond token voting governance.

3.3. Measuring Contribution

DAOs have two main sources of capital that they can use to achieve their goals: internal and external.

Internal capital is mainly financial capital, which exists in the treasury of the DAO. This is probably the most important part of the development of a DAO, as internal capital is used to encourage participation and improve the core product or service.

External capital is made up of humans living on the fringes. While rewards are a great tool for incentivizing contributors who provide the most value, the proper mechanism isn't fully understood (by far the most common way I've seen it is to enter the work you've done into a spreadsheet, so that it can be tracked and evaluated). Gitcoin, Coordinape, and SourceCred are working on interesting ideas for capturing and quantifying contributions.

To enable meaningful work and retain top talent over the long term, DAOs must have more user-friendly tools, assign ownership to small working groups with specialized goals, and use KPIs to measure their progress.

3.4. Legal

As with the broader cryptocurrency industry, the DAO's regulatory clarity and implementation of an efficient form of taxation will be a fulcrum for community adoption and engagement. Core contributors and engineers worry about the legal risks of working for The DAO because there is a great deal of uncertainty about possible repercussions. While some progress has been made on the legal front, such as Wyoming's DAO law, which legally recognizes DAOs as limited liability companies, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Someone came up with some ideas for DAOs to work together on a technical layer. Since most DAOs are trying to figure out the same issues, whether legal or not, there are many opportunities to collaborate at the social level and reach conclusions that are beneficial to both parties. We’re already starting to see this in DeFi, like the DeFi Education Fund, whose mission is to “educate policymakers on the benefits of decentralized finance and bring regulatory clarity to the DeFi ecosystem.”

3.5. Implementation

From an operational and management perspective, DAOs still have many problems to solve, which requires a lot of innovation in DAO tools. Focusing on building the means to help DAOs achieve their goals is a top priority.

Various tools are being built to ensure efficient governance and voting, which facilitates many good ideas and suggestions from the community. But there is a lack of people actually implementing them. This could take weeks, or even months, depending on the content of the proposal. Emphasis must be placed on implementing instrumentation to facilitate the continual development and improvement of the DAO.

Today, DAOs face many administrative, organizational and legal challenges. While many tools are being built, from analytics to voting platforms to multisig accounts, there are still many areas of opportunity.

4.1. Automation

Compound’s Autonomous Proposal, which allows members to delegate voting power to ideas rather than just people, gives us a glimpse into the future. Building processes to enforce outcomes without relying on humans to enforce the will of the community (towards automation) would make DAOs very powerful. This is especially important for protocol DAOs to scale, as they reduce the need for governance and enable greater network effects through automation.

4.2. Composability

It is especially difficult to predict how DAOs will develop and which use cases will be pursued by participants. Therefore, using a combination of developer platforms and composable tools -- such as connecting your Gnosis Safe multi-signature account with the Snapshot voting platform -- will allow DAOs to develop their own specialized tools to achieve their goals and address design and Item matching issues. This is especially important for constantly experimenting with different organizational structures and practices to achieve the different purposes for which the DAO was established.

4.3. Incentives

Allocation of financial rewards and distribution tools must be emphasized to improve stakeholder engagement and community building. Motivating intrinsically motivated players who deliver long-term value from the start, such as builders and active community members, rather than speculators, is fundamental to success. In addition to in-game mechanics such as token vesting, limited transferability, and rewards for early contributors, more experimentation must be done with different tools to onboard smaller token holders and encourage them to make Significant contributions, even though they may not have a large financial interest in the project. Perhaps this can be achieved by creating tools that allow participants to exercise power and governance through reputation rather than token ownership.

4.4. Community

The most successful projects have a core team focused on building their community around their core mission and are active with members, motivating them by making them feel part of something real. Tools that facilitate coordination and social interaction on a more human level will enable stronger relationships between participants and improve the quality of the community. This is extremely important because the success of a community is determined by the bonds between its members and the strength of their shared beliefs.

final thoughts

Current DAO tools have played an incredible role in fueling the explosive growth of DAOs and their communities by reducing many technical and operational frictions. It will be very interesting to witness how these tools evolve to overcome current and future challenges, especially those related to social cohesion.

Ultimately, it is the DAO's community that drives its success. Most importantly, the community has always cared about their shared mission. The best DAO tools will be those built to optimize a well-functioning community and ensure that the community remains happy and consistent over the long term.

Given that the DAO revolution has just begun, and the pace of innovation in the space shows no signs of slowing down, I believe exciting new tools will be built to help shape and support these communities, redefining the way we collaborate online. Perhaps, as virtual reality develops further, it will become one of the most important tools for DAOs to improve interaction, coordination, and connection among community members.

Original source:forefront