Decentralized Organizations

Description

Vitalik Buterin (in the context of the Blockchain):

"In general, a human organization can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property. For example, consider a simple corporation running a chain of stores. The corporation has three classes of members: investors, employees and customers. The membership rule for investors is that of a fixed-size (or optionally quorum-adjustable size) slice of virtual property; you buy some virtual property to get in, and you become an investor until you sell your shares. Employees need to be hired by either investors or other employees specifically authorized by investors (or other employees authorized by other employees authorized by investors, and so on recursively) to participate, and can also be fired in the same way, and customers are an open-membership system where anyone can freely interact with the store in the obvious officially sanctioned way for any time. Suppliers, in this model, are equivalent to employees. A nonprofit charity has a somewhat different structure, involving donors and members (charity recipients may or may not be considered members; the alternative view sees the positive increments in the recipients’ welfare as being the charity’s “product”).

The idea of a decentralized organization takes the same concept of an organization, and decentralizes it. Instead of a hierarchical structure managed by a set of humans interacting in person and controlling property via the legal system, a decentralized organization involves a set of humans interacting with each other according to a protocol specified in code, and enforced on the blockchain. A DO may or may not make use of the legal system for some protection of its physical property, but even there such usage is secondary. For example, one can take the shareholder-owned corporation above, and transplant it entirely on the blockchain; a long-running blockchain-based contract maintains a record of each individual’s holdings of their shares, and on-blockchain voting would allow the shareholders to select the positions of the board of directors and the employees. Smart property systems can also be integrated into the blockchain directly, potentially allowing DOs to control vehicles, safety deposit boxes and buildings." (https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/)