We are definitely playing DAO on hard mode. DAOs are a really new structure. There are no defined best practices, though some are starting to form.
Every DAO is different and has a different origin story. Most DAOs in the space today started with a centralized organization or body of members. They have deliberately decentralized. They have taken clear responsibilities, put them on a board, and said “how do we decentralize this?”
Other DAOs formed with a small leadership group and expanded out. Once again, leadership roles and responsibilities were shared and defined early within a smaller group, and as new members onboarded the structure was easily understood.
Some DAOs have treasuries in the hundreds of millions of dollars and can say “yes” to every initiative, empowering everyone! Not sure yet what value this will return.
And then there is us. A group of internet strangers instantly with 1000+ members. No preexisting leadership, no preexisting roles & responsibilities. No scale-up period. We are playing on hard mode. When we get discouraged, we should remember this.
But our origin story is what makes this place so exciting and better than “most of crypto twitter!” There was no way to get the genuine community and contributors we have now any other way. There’s work to be done, but many of the problems we have now are good problems to need to solve. How do we better empower people who want to lead!
At permissionless, I listened to frogmonkee (bankless/orca), julz (orca), and kevin (gitcoin) give the most depressing talk on how DAOs are not winning, in a talk titled “Why DAOs will win.” But really, it wasn’t depressing, it was an honest look at the work we have to do to figure out this social coordination problem we have. Everyone is struggling with this, and a lot of them aren’t even playing on hard mode! So keep your heads up and let’s keep grinding.