Good morning. How are you? Doing pretty well. Yeah, it's an interesting week with it being a shorter one with all the holidays and such, but yeah, doing well. Hope you yourself, Travis. Yeah, actually enjoying the
travel on the other trip said good morning but it is a f getting to be late afternoon already over here on a Friday so the week is almost done. Amazing the food has been incredible
people have been really kind. It's very different base of life over here from the US in some amazing ways and some ways that are incredibly frustrating for those type 8 people around. Yeah, so yeah, we're just getting
gathered. I've been nice to have you join in us. Thank you. We'll probably be a smaller crew today just with the week's pace that have just been sort of sensing out there in the in the metaverse, but we're recording and yeah John's gonna join us soon hopefully.
fully and a few others. So, how have you been doing with all the turmoil in the ecosystem? Yeah, you know, it's been, I mean, it's been wild. I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, 2021 was so
that in many ways we all were sensing that it was coming right you know it's like oh yeah there'll be another winter or you know this is this is a crazy frenetic bull run but yeah it always comes it's funny you know you know you know this and you rationalize this but like knowing so
something to be true and then viscerally feeling it to be true are different things. So we're like, oh yeah, this is good. It should come. We need this correction. It'll clean out some of the silliness. And then when you get a visceral sense of what kind of silliness it manifested in 2021, you're just like, oh, that doesn't feel good. But like, you know, yeah.
I was cheering for, you know, correction. I was cheering for, you know, seeing what projects were really building something real. And, you know, that's what this phase will do. But, you know, it just feels awful. You know, when the energy gets sucked out of the system and everybody has to figure out
out how to find their sense of purpose and joy again amidst it. That's my take on it anyways. No, it does. It feels like that dreaded task, right? The grooming of the back log or cleaning out the storage shed where you're like,
Things will be better on the other side, but for the meantime, this is just gonna suck. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, for those who are gathering today, we're gonna talk a little bit about self-organizing systems, right? Because there's been a
a lot of dialogue in the last few months about, hey, you know, Dows didn't invent this, you know, some of these ways of working, you know, sure we applied smart contracts and that brings some pretty cool stuff to the mix, but Travis who's joined in us today, well I'm going to let Travis introduce himself and we're going to hopefully have John coming in and join us as
and John and Travis are long time practitioners in self-organizing self-governing systems and organizations and have sort of observed some patterns that might be helpful to us as we're considering how we build upon the different things that we experimented with.
in Dowsen in the last year or so. So yeah, welcome to Kale, welcome Ivan, welcome Rowan, and yeah, welcome Travis. So Travis, why don't you introduce yourself in your background? If John trickles in, we'll get John to do the same and then we'll kind of see where the conversation goes in terms of the themes of governance patterns.
and healthy patterns inside of these types of organizations. Yeah, I'm, thank you, Brian, I'm excited to be here. It's been a fun journey. I started my career in engineering and popped around to different places.
like TechSport and Sales and Building Out Sales and Marketing Teams. And I was very much a greatager. Interesting now because John was just calling me. So I'm guessing he's having problems getting into the other room.
Let me see if I can talk and send them some links at the end of the same time. And so don't worry, I'll do that, Travis. Ah, brilliant. Thank you. And so the bad...
inspiration came for me when I realized that people's motivation and energy was very different than just a good system, right? It wasn't just a good idea that people were following. It was like the other interpersonal connection and when you could unleash people's energies and great ideas.
along with the interpersonal piece of the puzzle, then a whole bunch of opportunity pops out. Like, especially like, Taylorism coming back in the day and all the things of breaking work into small individual
little bite-sized repeatable pieces transformed the entire economy over the last 100 years and it's been incredible and it seems like thousand what's emerging now is like the next iteration of that and I've been helping organizations
both nonprofit and for-profit find their way through that mess for a while and that's why I was so excited to see these things start to pop up and primitive and come back to my coding routes and my engineering side with the other downside of the world.
Yeah, this is one of the fun things about this sort of phase that we're in right now, which is like, you know, all the things coming together and integrating together, technology, people, society, governance, politics, economics, et cetera, et cetera,
the often discounted aspects of what it means to live here on this planet. I think this is what's so fun about it and so it's neat to see that your history brings these things together too. Travis, just to kind of kick it into a
with a bit of a different gear, I'm sort of wondering, what are some of the things that we started having some conversations recently about DAO's? What are some of the things that drew your interest to DAO's? Because you've been thinking about better ways of working for
quite some time. Maybe you can highlight how that journey has been for you and why Dow is more recently as a space of interest. Yeah, great question. So to me, like the energy and the excitement that was coming into the
over the last decade, which is like distributing authority and autonomy out to the other people around the edges that often have a lot more context, especially in this knowledge of autonomy that we're working on at the moment.
And it seems that Dows have found a way to take that and instantiate that into not just an idea, but turn it into code and then take it as a further and turn it into a practice, right? Because the
the number of people that are excited and energized by this. And like I often talk with business leaders and business owners about like giving up their authority on autonomy to the system because the system wants to do something itself.
but that's hard for people that feel like they have a big stake in something to step away from. When you start with that premise in mind, which is what Dau's typically do, it becomes way easier to create something that's very different and very powerful.
Yeah, that's beautiful and and definitely something that resonates for me is someone who was drawn from from that space into into Dows John John box with us. Hey John
Audio check. Thanks for joining. We'd love to introduce you as well. So, John, maybe you could share with us as Travis has what sort of your experience
in finding different patterns of organizing collectively making decisions and working together and how that's drawn you to DAO's more recently in the conversations that we've had the pleasure of having
I'm not sure if you're able to hear me now. We are. Yeah. Okay. I've been curiously trying to get in here. So I haven't been able to follow the conversation up to this point. So could you repeat what you were saying? No worries. We're doing mostly introductions at this point. And just
you know, before we hop into sort of the meteor topics, just a chance to introduce yourself, you know, how you've been exploring different patterns of organizing, governing, working together, and how that's more recently drawn your interest again in your case to Dows.
So I'd love to sort of hear that story in summary of your experience and interests. I think I've been for decades now, I've been exploring how do you create a bottom-up governance? How do you control from below as well as
setting up whatever administrative systems you need to operate top down. And I've written a couple of books. I'm very aware of some of the systems that have grown up in India, particularly the state of Kerala. There's some work being done in Europe now to
to try to replicate the bottom-up system that they have in Kerala. I loved the video that we saw recently with the accounting for the people in Northeast Syria that have, you know, brigades of women have been defeating ISIS and
It's a very bottom up kind of a thing with a lot of different tribes involved, including the Kurds. So those are examples. I also know a lot about collective impact, which is a way of trying to have people who are
components of a system getting together. I worked on the Appalachian Food Shed Project, for example, where we created food councils and each food council might have many people from different parts of the system, from farmers to trucking companies to grocery stores, the food banks, and so on. Coordinating the foods
system in Appalachia. So there are a lot of non-dou, non-electronic forms that have been being explored for bottom-up governance. And the challenge now is to ask how can the douse also
Uh, rule themselves from the bottom up. It doesn't mean um um That any form of organization goes away and everybody just mills around. There's there's very definitely an organizational challenge. So let me stop there Yeah, I think that's uh, that's brilliant and you know given uh
sort of the topics that John yourself, myself and Travis have been discussing, we've been noticing some patterns in DAO's that maybe work at first to get things started but haven't, you know, don't scale well or aren't
So I'd love to sort of talk about that and a KAA the top down patterns and so, you know, let's sure, you know, I'll characterize how that often starts. You know, a Dow will start with hey, let's gather. Let's go into a discord server and communicate. Let's pool some, you know, some fun.
together using a token as a sort of marker of collaboration that lets you use that token in governance, whether it's an ERC20 token or an NFT or non-fungible token. And we start making decisions about, hey, we were
We're on a mission together, we brought together some funding to go on that mission together and we've set up a mechanic for a very simplistic top-down mechanic for making decisions together to deploy those funds. That's really how it starts and it starts very top-down because it starts to spawn activity, whether it's projects or
skills or fun adventures, you know, each Dow goes on a different mission relative to its purpose. But the, as it starts to scale in this top down way, some problems and challenges have emerged. And so, you know, I'll throw it back to you, John, to maybe talk about some of the things that you've seen and
noticed in terms of this may not be on a healthy path? Well, I guess one of the experiences I had with one of the cryptocurrency systems
was that there were people who had the time or the capability to be fairly active in the diodes, the various diodes that were kind of in existence there. And some of them were very clever, good manipulators, great traditional politicians.
But they would they just emerged kind of like any time you have a crowd of people together whoever has the biggest personality or The loudest voice or the most people paid off or whatever it is will tend to dominate and those people are not accountable
They're not elected. They're not, I mean, there's some, if you have things you're voting on, there's going to be various people who are informed and various people who are not informed. And you can organize to have representatives. Take a look at those, the detailed things.
and vote for you, but you need to be able to pull them back immediately. And so if people just start floating up with no structure to it, then you can't remove them. You can't control them in any way. Your voice is just a
crowd that occasionally might happen to, you know, throw some votes at something because you happen to own some of the currency. So without structure, you invite the traditional situation of the strong personality to start to dominate and there's no
to make sure that they're doing what they do in your interests. Is that a good enough summary? I don't know. Yeah, no, I think it definitely gets us started. Travis, I'd want to ask, "Hey, what are your thoughts on some of the things that, based on your experiences?"
in self-organizing systems that weren't using tokens, what are some of the things that you're nervous about when you look at DAO's as they get started? We're all excited, but there's things we're nervous about, based on history and experiences we've had. Travis, what are yours? >> In systems outside DAO's, you often see
the Democratic approach, the one person one vote, or the Dow implementation of that often is token weighted voting, the idea that we can overcome a problem of the strong man by spreading out and doing it in a democratic way.
us live in a democratic society and so that feels like it's a natural fit and a good path forward. But you run into the tyranny of the majority very quickly, right? As soon as you've got 51%, you can do anything you want and you don't need to
to listen to other ideas. And so there might be wisdom in the dissenting voices, especially depending on how they're dissenting and what interests they're holding. And if you can just run a rough shot over them, you can get things that very quickly lead to split
factions, right? And you can see this across the crypto community, right? Where Bitcoin has splintered a couple of different times. Now there's been one main stalk, but there's been people that are like, hang on, I don't like the way this is going. And I've got no other way to do
to accept my tokens and leave. And that's common in democratic type systems, especially when the leaving costs are not terribly high, right? And in Dows, often governance tokens
can be sold on the other market, which is a feature and a challenge both. Yeah, exactly. I think this is great because it sort of gets into the trade-offs, right? And why, why doubts were so exciting and why they were very functional, sort of at first in the early stage.
ages, you know, from my experiences, you know, sort of watched the level of coordination and at scale that could happen very quickly when you deploy a token, declare a mission, and start, you know, together. The first of all, the group, when they first get started,
It's big, but it's not going on an exponential growth curve. There's an initial arrival. Those folks are all very focused in initially. They're very mission driven.
often if a project is doing a good job of declaring what its vision in its purpose is, it's attracting very mission-aligned focus. Those early faces of the Dow, or at least that's the experience I've had, and therefore, you know, the participation in the voting, first of all, one, you know, there aren't, you know,
There aren't often whales, unless they're doing a progressive decentralization where the founding group is a bit whaleish in the token-weighted voting. But some of the best ones I've played in is relatively reasonably distributed so that it didn't feel like it had a platocracy.
And everybody is in there and has shared context and what we're trying to do or the operations is pretty simplistic initially. It's a bit chaotic, but the challenges that John was bringing forward in particular, like a policy king,
folks subtly accumulating power and trying to capture value as value is being created. Those types of games start to happen once the DAO has traction relative to its mission or start to generate a value
and then income the speculators, income the sort of plutocratic whale attacks and things can get a little bit funky as well as you know you get churn interest interest and participation and so you have some people who are just holding and others who are actively participating and it kind of gets you know confusing as to who
who's got context to make decisions and you start to have apathetic voters or voters who are showing up and just kind of clicking the "yes" button because everybody else seems to have clicked "yes" and so like this lack of context can be a real problem and then Travis, like as you
the other challenges is you can get these tyranny of the majorities and you sure Dows have the ability to sell your tokens which is a feature but this tyranny of a majority we shouldn't just accept it as an unsolvable problem and so that kind of
generates my next question, which would be like, "Hey, what types of things can we do to address this? What other patterns have we observed in smaller scales or even large scales that inspire us in terms of tackling some of these challenges?" Because even if we improve civil resistance, which is a thing that we talk about
Right. And so like I often think about the the smallest useful unit. And so I go back to my software development days. There's often like a two-piece the role right seven seven people plus or minus two is a really good working group where people can have a high
degree of understanding and share pool of meaning amongst them. And so if we can move a lot of the decisions down to those people and then find some ways of bubbling up the other different groups and bringing those groups
together, that can be a bottom up path. And then we can bring in the things where one person, one vote, democracy or token, we can vote voting brings a lot of value, which is like to consent or to remove consent from the
the actions that are being planned or being taken. But those smaller groups can create much more thoughtful, nuanced, and very responsive actions to what's going on out in the broader world. And given how quickly things are changing at the
the moment that seems to be a highly advantageous capacity. I'll let John talk a little bit about how that looks in practice and bubbling up to those different groups. Right. Well, this consent maybe takes a little bit of
discussion first. Consent is not consensus. If you look at the American Declaration of Independence, it says governments exist by the consent of the people. And it doesn't say the consensus of the people or the majority vote. Consent is a really
whole person base and so your feelings come into it and all that kind of stuff because that's all part of the overall system. So people might decide to kick out the king not on a logical basis just because I can't stand it anymore and so it's like you push them away and that it's actually
It's difficult to express in English. Much easier said in Dutch. If you have an objection to something in Dutch, you're basically saying, "I feel heavy. I feel made by heavy." Or, "I feel made heavy." And that the word consensus or consensus
in English, that doesn't have any of that emotional connotation. So consent is a system-based method of making a decision. All the facets of the system get to come into play. And you're basically asking people, is what we're proposing to do good enough for now and safe enough to try?
It can you live with it all those kinds of phrases are what you're asking when you make a decision that's very different the majority vote so That's the first challenge in an online situation is trying to capture some element of that Outside of Russia
that goes on. That's why small groups tend to be better at making consent decisions because you can talk with each other and you don't have to have somebody that's in control of things or a big microphone if it's people that are together. You can just
talk and you can trust people if you can get to know them and you can pull people back quickly because all you have to do is get together and say we're pulling the sky back that we've got as a representative. So that getting that full system perspective into a DAO that's online is challenge number one.
The solution seems to be break the down into its subcomponents so that all the different system components or group components or interest groups or whatever can then express their voice through an elected representative.
And the bottom-up systems that are in existence now have very strict limits, like max 30 people, to make a decision. And then you elect representative, and then 30 of those groups then have representatives at the next higher level of
abstraction and then 30 of those and so forth. The experience is that traditional governments get really freaked by that kind of thing because suddenly they see their power going away. But in various situations it has been possible to go up a number of levels and that's
If we're trying to follow that model in the Dow, you've got first of all the problem of bite-sized groups that can make consent decisions and organizing this structure of representatives. And that's totally different than
majority vote when you use the spot-em-up method, you end up with a lot of cohesion. Groups that I've put this in, it's like, you know, they feel really solid. They all identify with each other and there's none of this factional stuff. And how to do that online is a challenge.
Yeah, I think this is sort of this is a beautiful spot to pause because I think what's happened if I could summarize is we've we've uncovered sort of two two building blocks and a how might we question so the two building blocks be one we're
recognizing that if thousands of people are over top of one governance mechanic using their tokens to try and make decisions, that just becomes a mess. And that it's much better to break things into small teams because small teams are effective. They can communicate better and have higher context when they're making decisions.
The second building block in addition to small teams is this consent decision making thing. And that both Travis and John have highlighted. You know, John, I love some of the examples regarding language, how it's felt. You know, you feel consent and also
a reminder that the Constitution in the U.S. has the word in it. It's declaration of independence. Yes, sorry, the declaration of independence. I'm a Canadian so you know, terrible at least. You're aligned with that thing, do we?
throughout. And it was like July 4th this week, so like double shame on me. But I think so, two building blocks, consent decision making in small teams, and then, you know, I think the challenge we're sort of facing is, okay, how do we do this in a digital space?
with sort of Dow tools and Dow mechanics. But at the same time, I just think there's a real opportunity here because the weakness that we're characterizing in Dow is that they're great at quickly spawning a bunch of structure because this top down mechanic very quickly
So they quickly tend to realize it's ineffective and, you know, dows start to spawn pods, works dreams, guilds, you know, etc. And so they very quickly start to get very mission focused teams up and running and they often are small teams. So, you know, if that is there, how
How would we start to practice? If I was saying a project or a guild, how could I locally get started in a consent decision making practice before we start to figure out how to spread it across a full doubt? And feel free whichever review is interesting going first on that prompt.
I might jump in and say like, that's a really fun question. And there's another one that's a little pre-racted that, which is what is a little group allowed to experiment with and how far are they allowed to go? What's their realm of okay decisions versus when does it start impacting
other people. And I think that was often get like some understanding of this because following the funding following the other tokens, anything that's moving money around or moving tokens around often raises people's attention like, oh, okay.
we need to pay attention to that, which is a pretty good instinct. And there's some other ones where it's easy when groups are on their own little stream. But what about when they need to interact with each other? How can you carve out little autonomous zones?
Like starting from how can these groups experiment? Let's first talk about how they can do it when they're working in an area where they've got autonomy and control and can do their own things without bumping into other people. And then we'll talk about the more interesting and common case
of when what they're doing bumps in to other people. John, do you want to talk about the decision on that first group? Right. But the situation you're dealing with when you're going bottom up is that you have both structure and no structure.
So if I'm here and I'm in some guild, but I'm also interested in some other topic, I might be in two or three different groups or circles, whatever you want to call them. And that's okay. And there's a lot of milling around and cost sectional
On the on one I'll call it level of abstraction. It's like actually doing the concrete work. There's another level of abstraction which was if you think of like raising yourself up in the air so you have a larger view. You lose the view of some of the details but you see
see a larger picture. And that's why the representative, the elected representative is so important. So the representatives get together and say, you know, we really need to restrict people from doing this or we need to encourage that. And they come back and they explain to their groups, this is why
we did that. That's why I consented to that. And so we need to coordinate on this or we need to check with that before we do this thing we're thinking of. And if we don't like it then I can carry the thing back up to the larger group, you know the higher level group and we can
a rule, as to how we're operating. So they take on a leading or a top-down function, but they do it because if they come up from the bottom and they can be pulled back down, those rules can be changed.
But you've got to have that. You've got to have some kind of rules of the road to make it possible for everybody to cooperate effectively. How's that? Are we going to ask the folks listening if they have any questions?
Yeah, absolutely. And anyone can unmute and sort of ask a question about what we've been discussing and maybe how we start to apply some of it in the context of doubt. Anyone feeling the energy in the ask anything?
feel pretty just unmuted and go. While we're waiting for that and if anybody pops in, go for it. I thought we could also start moving towards how these mechanics actually start to move on chain because we can like I know there was a discussion with the Hats Protocol. All that guy.
that we're talking about this. And I think there's a great like corollary here between how consent based decisions start to get made and like the idea of people in different guilds or different circles or people wearing different hats. And like it starts with
The idea that like you've got to have enough context that somebody else says like yeah, you're cool You're you're part of the group that's making decisions around this right so so somebody might be leading you know a guild for you know partnerships or something like that and they somebody's got that in
initial context, probably coming from the other top. And let me say, hey, I noticed that you also want to be in here. Come help me with this. Or, yeah, please come let's do this. Or it might start the other way and go bottom up where a bunch of people are just noticing a problem where we're
have in problem synchronizing the other different groups and we all kind of recognize this and we all get together as a collective to try and solve that problem. And so those groups start in slightly different ways, but they have autonomy over either a
domain that nobody was really looking after or over something specific that somebody was asked or tapped or noticed needed to be done and addressed. And that group can then start to get together and you can start to imagine how that could be put on
on chain with hats protocol or some other way of NFTs and flagging that somebody is part of this group or part of that or has these responsibilities and similar types of people can start to get together and say, "Great, how do we make
decision about this that or the other. And John, do you want to talk about maybe some of the standard consent-based decision protocols that are out there? Yeah, there's first one, probably really high interest would be the protocol-free
electing somebody. And that has a very specific format, very quickly everybody on their own indicates to whoever is facilitating what their choice is. You make that without listening to other
people. And then the person facilitating goes to each one of you and says, "All right, you know, John, you nominated Suzy. Why did you do that?" And I say, "Well, because Suzy has all these great characteristics blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And so that's why I want Suzy. And then we hear from Travis and he nominated George and so forth.
with. And so we all hear what the reasons are. And then there's a change round. Okay, well, you know, I had said Susie. It's my turn to the round. I had said Susie, but I'd really like Travis's arguments for George. So I'm going to switch to George. Or I say I stay the same. You know, stay with Susie or I pass or whatever.
And by the time you've gone through these two rounds of hearing everybody and kind of sensing into it, the pattern very often is that the stronger arguments are for this person or that. It may be the person who has the most quote unquote votes or not. That's not the deciding factor.
the nature of the arguments. And so the facilitator says I'm hearing this ABCD. Susie has DNC and Mary has that, but it looks to me like the best fit and it's never perfect for the best fit would be George. And then you go around to each person ending with
with George saying, "Do you consent? Are you okay with this or can you live with George?" And if not, then you say, "Well, you know, George is like going to be out of town for eight months, you know, but what's that?" or whatever. And you say, "What's your objection to George's?" And there's various
scenarios you can imagine where okay we can't get anybody what do we do in this solution to that but that going around and reasoning together you end up with the person that everybody consents to which doesn't mean it's your favorite person but you're okay let's go with this and there's no factions
Everybody's there saying, okay George, go do your job. We are you know of one opinion and wanting you and it sounds like it would be consensus, but it's not a very carefully structured way of making the decision. Most decisions that are not you know electing somebody will start out with
the proposal. And I think we should eat ice cream at the local store. And everybody says somebody else might go to that and say, you ask, you ask, you go to a round of questions. So somebody might say, well, how much does it cost at that store? Well, it
this. Okay, and so you make sure that you understand what the proposal is and as the questions are asked, then the proposal is changed on the spot. Whether it's on a flip chart because you're in person or whether it's on a Google Doc because you're online, you see the proposal changing. So now the proposal says
I propose we go to the local store and eat ice cream and we won't spend more than $5 a person. Okay, now we have a different proposal and you go around on that getting questions clarified you do another round of people giving reactions. I don't like ice cream. I like sherbert and so
We have to go to a store that also sells Sherbert. Okay, well, that's not the local store. We got to go down five miles down the road to get Sherbert also. Okay, so now our proposal changes and it changes as you're talking and in the end, then the facilitators says, "Can we consent to this?" And sometimes people still don't consent for the
something new comes up and you add their thoughts in. So it's a process of accumulating thoughts, synthesizing thoughts, you're not asking what's the strongest argument, you're asking what is each person's voice say and how do we incorporate that voice into the decision. So that's the other really, the simplest
format. If you don't start with a proposal and you've simply got to say, "Wow, we're dealing with this problem, we don't know what to do," then there's a longer format where you collect your picture and you form the proposal and then you make a decision.
Those are basically the decision making formats. There's a lot of variations. One of the most interesting things is asking for performance review. That's really powerful. The only time I've ever had good performance reviews is when I've done it in this format of consent. That's another format.
So there's other variations, but those are the basic formats that seem to have been proven pretty solid over time. The key, of course, is that you've got to have a facilitator that knows what they're doing. And so there's training in the downside of all this is that there's training involved because nobody explained to us in fourth grade how to do this.
And like the one that was most shocking for me and I think a lot of people find this very shocking is what qualifies as a reasonable as an objection that can stop, right? It's often described as something that's going to cause harm or move us backwards and where
what most people try and insert as objections but normally doesn't hold water is well i think this other idea is is better right just because you've got something better is uh is not a reason to uh to stop moving forward or to try something in most cases and the vast majority of cases and
And that's a really big fundamental shift from people trying to argue from various positions to try and find a position that everybody can live with. If I can interrupt, if I'm a facilitator and somebody says, "I like this better,"
that I would like you to say, "Well, what is it that you don't like about this? What's your objection to it that the other thing saws?" And they say, "Oh, well, you know, this other store has chocolate sprinkles." Okay, so what you want then is a store that sells sherbet and ice cream and has chocolate sprinkles. And that meets your need.
Okay, yeah, okay. And so you're synthesizing it all the time. You're not rejecting the other thing. You're saying, what is it that's missing that you're seeing over there? And let's get it that it's, let's bring it together. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is great because there's a behavioral element to this and in this pattern.
That is a key building block. We called it consent. We just said oh, yeah, it's consent, but we're recognizing there's consent based elections. There's consent based, you know methods of proposing and clarifying some sort of action that we could collectively take. And so and Travis you're starting to hint at oh, okay, well how do we
How do we recognize where we're at with Dows and the technologies we're using and how can we apply this? You mentioned hats protocol which we had on this Twitter space just not so long ago. The thing I'm noticing about the consent based election when I was having conversations with John and Travis is that
You, the very first thing you consent to is that somebody is a part of the team and can make decisions alongside you. And so that was a real eye opener for me because one of the things that's challenging and messy in DAOs right now is we have really good clarity on
of who is able to vote in the root Dow token voting mechanic. The governance and membership at the sort of sub-dow or sub-unit level in a Dow is a lot more messy. In fact, you can like say you're a part of the design guild or say you're
a project X sometimes by just clicking and emoji in a discord server and fume all of a sudden you have that roll tag in your part of that and it's very permissionless which is great because you know that unlocks visibility of that project and your ability to go sort of crash and meeting and start to become curious and interested in non-board into that project but that doesn't really
mean you are an active member of that project with high context that the fellow members of that team see you as somebody who has enough context, skills and dedication to be a member alongside them making decisions.
So I think if we don't get explicit about membership inside the subunits of DAO's, then we haven't got that sort of first building block of how to then start to use that to form consent and make that consent explicit. And so that's why I think, you know,
something like hats protocol or something that demarks you are your peers have consented to you being a member and having member rights alongside them in this small team. And if we solve that it starts to become then oh now you have a marker that says you can participate in a consent round.
when we make a decision around what we're going to do as a team or who else is going to become a part of the team or who perhaps maybe should no longer be a part of the team because they're just not here anymore. And we want to say, hey, can we recognize that, you know, you know, Ling is no longer showing up and, you know, as per our member agreement, you know,
that means that links no longer a member and you know, link and reapply as a member, you know, kind of thing. And so there's there's this just basic membership mechanics. This seems like a really strong starting point. But and then once we have this, you know, my realization was if we can demark this in some sort of way and have a mechanic for that
decision and perhaps have a member NFT can participate in a local vote. I wouldn't even call it a vote, it's so that you can run, you can theoretically for bigger decisions run a on-chain vote and structure it so that it's a consent
You know, you sure you might have the facilitated dialogue or the asynchronous, you know, working of a proposal with a protocol of like, you know, proposal, clarifying questions, reactions, adjustments, et cetera, but eventually something gets to that, that consent phase. And if you want to make that consent really explicit,
it, you can consent using your NFT or consent using your decentralized identity and you know your verifiable claim to membership in that team. And so I think that was sort of a real aha moment for me because once we can do that digitally we could perhaps start to organize like some
some of the things that John and Travis have observed where it's not tokenized. And so I don't know what reactions you have Travis and John to that sort of like thing that was an a-ha for me and quite exciting for me. That became like the basic building block that like everything
else easily like that was basically the link in my mind that brought all of the possible ways that I've worked with organizations and makes it apparent how it becomes a way to easily do on change.
agree with you that that was a really big click and like so much of this and trying to think about all of these governance searches and putting them into code has actually clarified some base level assumptions that I didn't even know I've had for years, which has been amazing.
I like it a lot too. There's a lot of somethings like let's say a group is together and say, you know, we're really trying to do two different things that split so you have rules on that. But one thing that occurs to me is something like an emoji system where you could somehow signal the emotional
component to you not being able to live with something like, you know, this is making my arm shake. This is like my stomach's turning at this sort. Along with, you know, I have an objection and my stomach is turning so that people kind of get where you're at.
And it might be interesting to have some sort of symbolic way of expressing the, I mean, it's easy to express the reasons, but also the symbolic component would be interesting to experiment with the symbolic emotions or emotional language.
or something. Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's a it's a throwback that we had chance taken on our Twitter space, a community manager at Citadel and chance highlighted for us that emojis and particularly gifts are the way in which we can express ourselves digitally and what we're feeling
So it's an imperfect language, but perhaps trying to understand how that comes into to this is definitely just as important as determining membership and representation. We as the members have elected this representative and therefore we're starting to create a bottom-up roll-up of governance.
I know I love that. I guess if I could just just sorry if I'm facilitating and I see somebody says okay my shoulders are better I can then say tell us more about your shoulders being tight and that is likely to lead to something much different
And it's just if, you know, hey, you said ABC, tell me about ABC. If you say, like, what's behind the emoji there, you get different things and it's much easier to try to deal with what's really going on. And I mean, that's what I do if I'm facilitating live. If somebody says no objection and they're looking at their belly button, I said,
like an objection because your mouth and your body are disagreeing. We need to know why you're hanging your head while you're saying I had no objection. That always leads to something. People are going, "Oh, we didn't think of that," or whatever. Just having that dual-languaging allows much more subtle facilitation.
Yeah, that's definitely one of the challenges of the digital space. We have this beautiful way of working that is preserving anonymity, but at the same time, it can truncate expression. Why I want to hand it over again for questions.
questions, you know, Row and I then, Christina, others, if you have something that you would like to ask or declare, react to some of this, that would be awesome. Yeah, I just wanted to say
Thanks very much. I've had questions come up throughout the Twitter space and they've always been answered. So I think, you know, thanks, B.P.T.s for being such a great host. And John and Travis, your knowledge on this, is, you know, it's been eye-opening for me. I think we talked a
a lot about, or you talked a lot about fundamental issues that in any space are going to manifest when you involve people in trying to make decisions. And yeah, it's just, it's exciting and it's been super interesting to listen to this. So thank you.
Anyone else want to declare or ask something?
All right, I guess one thing that we didn't really know that I would I think would be a fun way to sort of close things off or You know what what kind of look like or feel like when we when we get this right and so you know I'll throw it to each of you John and Travis
As an outro of like almost if you will experiences or case studies or observations of where this has happened and what it felt like or looked like and you know John I think I'd love it if you were able to maybe kick that off with
sort of a discussion of some of the things you've seen in India or the Netherlands just trying to give us a sense of or the Appalachian food supply chains. What maybe pick one of your favorites in
and share a story around what that can look like and how effective it can be. The general thing is if you've ever seen an athletic team like just really do well, they'll say something like a basketball team that we were just in the flow. And there's some state that you hit like that where ever
everybody's just clicking and you're almost like you're one organism and that becomes possible when you're not trying to do majority voting and say that you're making it together and you can do amazing things on the floor.
The English and the French had projects. The police said that the city runs on big, powerful streets and there is the faveless certain department at the University of
Virginia, that, sorry, Virginia Tech University in the up-of-the-mounts. And the professors were not very good leaders. And we finally, in the main office there, we had some representatives, we had the main office and
We had an election. We said you need somebody that can do the day-to-day leading. They ended up electing a woman who was like 28 who had been the administrative person in the office and what was like doing lots of leadership. They finally said, you know,
you do it. And it was amazing because when I was there subsequently I saw her with a baby on her hip leaning over Professor Jones and saying Professor Jones you were supposed to get this done today and you haven't got it. And they really clicked. She was a very good leader but it took the
the consent process and sitting back and thinking about it for them to realize that she had the leadership skills they needed. And so surprising things can happen when you're sitting back and thinking together and trying to synthesize ideas as opposed to arguing who has the best argument.
Over to you Travis. Yeah, I think when I think of what's possible I actually think humans do amazingly well in challenging and hard situations and I think there's no shortage of those around in the other world at the moment and so I think of one organist
That was like a self organizing team. It was a recruiting company actually up up near a B. P. It's part of the other world and they were like they like most recruiting companies got Smacked hard when covid came right they were focused
on the other small business recruiting side of the world, 60% of their business dried up in a four week stretch when the other world went into lockdown businesses didn't know what was going on. And so when you're in that really critical situation, the thing I see most
do is they will tighten down and grab control and try and whitenuckle their way through it. But this organization already moved tremendous away towards self-organizing and self-management. And so they had lots of people that were
Excited or energized or maybe even a little scared that went out trying to figure out what to do and they said well There's a whole bunch of need right now for people recruiting nurses and the medical etc and before they ended up growing the I was a multi-hundred person organ
and they grew six X in the other the course of six months while most recruiting firms were in the middle of collapsing or barely scraping by and to me that's what's possible when lots of small teams know that they're not going to to have
have their energy and their best ideas stamped out by somebody on up the other chain that's worried about what happens and how does this all fit together in some master plan that I can control. And so that's where I get excited by the
potential on Dows and when I already see happening and I just think that as long as we make sure to add a little bit of the right structures and avoid the wrong ones that we can unleash so much more human flourishing and the other coming years and decades.
Yeah, that's beautiful. I just want to say thank you because I think we're at the top of the hour and so I'm gonna wrap here folks, you know, follow along with Travis and John, you know, we're gonna do some writing related to this. So
monitor the ed team sobel and our mirror there and We'll be we'll be posting some thoughts around this and if you want to work With with any of the the tree of us or continue the conversation My DMs are open. Please don't you know hesitate to read
each out and we'll connect you in and continue the conversation together because I think we're going to try and look at how to distill these ideas, share them and see if there are dows out there who are interested in going a bit deeper so don't hesitate to give us a shout if you want to experiment.
together. All right. Well thank you. Thank you so much Travis. Thank you so much John for coming and sharing your thoughts on this. I'm excited to continue the journey of discussing this and sharing. Thank you.
Thanks everyone for showing up. I'm going to tweet a thread of some of the things that I summarized from here as well. Have a great Friday and end of week. Bye.