Jihad Esmail, GLF2022 Team
As web3 projects and protocols move towards user-ownership, thousands of communities have been launched that are rediscovering the world of self-governance.
Folks from across the ecosystem have come together to coordinate in new and interesting ways, but some old, human problems became increasingly apparent. DAO contributors and operators were forced to come face-to-face with organizational design and governance challenges that technology simply isn’t able to solve. People are still people.
As a result, we have seen a lot of reinventing the wheel. Almost all DAO contributors have found themselves falling into the same traps as organizations that came before them. Slowly, but surely, the ecosystem has moved in the direction of learning from our long, rich, global history of coordination and governance.
Orca and Other Internet have teamed up to explore key trends and beliefs surrounding web3 governance. The results, which are outlined in this essay, informed the design of the Governance Learning Forum 2022 (GLF). Over the course of two days, GLF22 will bring together web3 governance practitioners and experts on governance and coordination beyond the crypto ecosystem.
This summit is not just another series of panels. GLF will feature unique online participation formats, emergent coordination methods, and live knowledge capture designed to help attendees meaningfully integrate learnings. Knowledge generated during the event will be published afterwards, with all participants as co-authors. There is no “audience” at GLF22, only participants.
In preparation for this event, we surveyed the crypto ecosystem to understand how governance challenges are currently emerging.
The goal of this piece is to outline the results and key findings from the survey, including responses from some of our event organizers.
109 people completed the Governance Learning Forum survey.
More than half of those surveyed considered themselves DAO operators or contributors, and a third considered themselves DAO founders or core team. We defined “DAO operator” as someone who is leading a working group, pod, team, or guild. “Contributors” were defined as anyone who was a part of any of those groups, while “core team” were anyone working for the DAO full-time.
We can assume, then, that while most people surveyed consider themselves to be contributors, a significant number of participants were leaders and decision-makers in their communities. Not surprisingly, over half of these folks considered their “areas of expertise” in their DAOs to be governance, org design, strategy, and/or community facilitation.
An almost identical number (~30%) of those surveyed said they have been in crypto since 2021 or 2017, with another 20% saying they have been in the space since 2015 or before. This showed a diverse range of “entrances” into the space.
Also diverse were the types of DAOs people were involved in, although a plurality seemed to be involved in DeFi protocol DAOs.