* Article: An Exploration of Internet-Native Organizations. By Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter. Forefront Journal, Aug 23, 2022

URL = https://www.forefront.market/blog/internet-native-organizations

Contextual Quote

"DAOs were originally envisioned as having automation in the center, and humans at the edges. In practice, this has been far from the truth, and DAOs as they exist today are fundamentally human. While smart-contracts may allow for trustware on-chain, we still need to rely on concepts that are fundamentally off-chain -- on giving, sharing, and working together towards better futures. All of this isn't to say we can't eventually build hyperstructures that further solidify the social agreements we create."

- Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter [1]

Excerpt

Non-Hierarchical Modes of Scaling DAOs

By Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter:

"Revisiting the idea of lore, is an interesting way to see how we might increase the chances of finding alignment within groups as they scale.

Stories and lore have existed as long as humans have. Fundamentally, as a species, we exist through and within stories. Stories guide and ground us through all aspects of life. Our sense of self is cemented through the stories we tell ourselves, and our sense of community is cemented by the stories we tell each other. In DAOs, like all organizations, stories are the lifeblood that remind us of who we are and why we are here. There is a vast literature around the organizational and psychological impact of stories, which web3 should deeply study.

Among other things, lore, stories, and the collective memories that shape them are able to replicate the emotional and metaphysical power of close relationships, and facilitate sense-making through world-building. Importantly, rather than MBA-style top-down mission-statements,7 stories in DAOs are crafted by and for the community. These stories retain their memetic power, and guide us through the darkness and towards the light like a compass magnetically pulled towards the vibes.

Fundamentally, these modes of scaling are often non-hierarchical. We all collectively author our stories by setting our shared meaning (mission), rhythms (ritual), and collective memories (lore) without direct assistance from external authority. We, as community members, craft and solidify lore together, build our worlds, and by doing so we lay the foundation for everything else.

More importantly, we do this not to drive some abstract notion of business value, but rather to manage our own mental models around what we want to see in the world (world-building). In the case of DAOs in particular, we can then use our own shared currencies9 to take the actions directly related to the world we've imagined (e.g., creating a solarpunk future). Each of these elements helps keep alignment in place a little bit longer, past Dunbar's number, and helps us build our castles in the sky.

Another often ignored aspect of even nascent online communities, especially DAOs, is some degree of clear leadership -- a person or group that can help shape the frame to allow the community to recognize its own potential.

David Ehrlichman has written extensively about impact networks and leadership within these groups, and he believes that leaders in decentralized organizations begin to embrace a network mindset, whereby they cease working in isolation and begin to focus on building meaningful relationships and sharing resources. As Ehrlichman writes, "Fundamentally, the role of network leaders is to help diverse groups find the shared purpose that unites them, to foster self-organization, and to coordinate the actions that emerge so that they inform and reinforce one another." Rather than establishing themselves as the center point of an organization, network leaders decisively work towards establishing relationships between community members, further extending informal alignment.

Leaders in DAOs, typically, are just the people with more context. In more traditional organizations, context is generally reserved for the C-suite, and if you're a delivery person for Amazon, Jeff Bezos won't be sharing his meeting notes with you. DAOs, in our minds, aren't like that at all. Context is available for anyone who cares enough to look into it, and this is a powerful mechanism that allows anyone to become a leader practically overnight. In DAOs, "everyone is a leader, deciding for themselves to follow the group's evolutionary purpose."

(https://www.forefront.market/blog/internet-native-organizations)

Principles of DAO Organizing

By Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter:

Principle 1 → Community is the heart of the DAO

A DAO is simply a group of humans who come together, form structures, and coordinate. As our friend David noted, these structures keep everyone "connected and in close communication so their actions are coherent and mutually reinforcing, combining into something greater than the sum of the parts." Only by keeping a community healthy can a DAO grow sustainably.

Principle 2 → Alignment is the lifeblood of community

Seeking alignment and consensus building where possible is crucial. Sometimes - it's necessary to move quickly and executively within a DAO, but it's important to be aware that this might create "alignment debt."

The most cohesive DAOs have formal processes (e.g., retros, practices around context sharing, recurring meetings) and cultural norms (e.g., contributor culture, social connections, inter-squad mingling) to help pay down this debt via regular consensus building. Establishing and maintaining high levels of shared context and trust allows communities to feel empowered to participate in a common mission.

Principle 3 → Sense and respond > command and control

As with all things, you can have too much or too little of them. It's possible to lean too far into structure (e.g., meeting every day at the same time), and at the same time, a lack of structure can be infuriating (e.g., we'll meet when we meet). Don't expect everything to be set in stone from day one, sense and respond to your environment with agency and conviction.

Beyond our three principles, Linda Xie, a steward and delegate at Gitcoin, also recently highlighted her key learnings from DAOs.12 Some of her key takeaways are as follows:

establish a clear mission to maintain alignment
explore progressive decentralization to ensure context is shared effectively
implement smaller working groups and enable local domains of authority
ensure accountability and ways of assessing engagement and activity
discuss compensation models that promote fairness and equity
establish long term sustainability (or defined lifespan) as an explicit objective
create a culture where people are comfortable having tough conversations
build in regenerative structures, take breaks and touch grass. "