The CommonsDAO
We think of a CommonsDAO as a "warm DAO," providing inclusive cultural practices, embracing polycentric governance, and catering to the diverse needs of the community. It goes beyond providing mere financial functionalities. Our commons designs consist of the technical and cultural protocols that reinforce commons-based governance, and a radically collaborative methodology to collectively design the parameters of a token economy.
How a DAO is deployed is as important as what is being deployed. Our deployment protocols incorporate Ostrom’s principles for governing a commons and reinforce collaborative decision making, what we call “economics co-design”. This unique combination of conditions creates the possibility for a sustainable and regenerative community-supported mission.
Cultural
frameworks
Blockchain technologies permit trustless resource sharing and interaction, but the cultural foundation of the communities that use that technology are built on human trust and cooperation. Even if smart contracts can effectively execute novel decentralized operations, humans must still coordinate on those processes. Effective decision-making requires collective coordination and clear guidelines. Our cultural frameworks incorporate tools and processes, based on Ostrom’s 8 principles for governing a commons, that allow purpose-driven communities to effectively govern themselves and their shared resources.
The principle of collective choice arrangements, for example, asserts that those affected by the rules of a system should actively be part of creating or modifying those rules, thereby building trust, cooperation and community values resulting in better and lasting outcomes. Some of the other principles include having clearly defined boundaries, mutual monitoring, conflict resolution, and graduated sanctions.
Our application of these principles guide a community to pursue its mission from a bottom-up approach that favors participatory, polycentric governance.
Economics
co-design
Traditional voting systems present a limited choice of options, where voters choose only from among the proposals selected for them, which invariably excludes voices and perspectives.
Co-design fosters inclusion, transparency, and active involvement whereby voters are guided to develop proposals themselves. It allows space for diverse perspectives, enabling innovative and practical solutions to flourish.
We use a simple yet effective 3-step process: educate, propose, and vote. Communities collectively develop solutions in an equitable and democratic manner that address their needs.
Educate
The community creates materials for its contributors to understand what is being decided, such as parameters of the economy itself. Everyone has the power to understand, devise and decide within the community.
Propose
Anyone can submit or “fork” a proposal for a vote. This bottom-up approach gives everyone equal opportunity to create voting proposals and also to build on each other’s work. It makes space for unexpected ideas from the community and taps into the collective intelligence.
Vote
The voting space is now filled with ideas that have come from everyone in the community. It is no longer limited and voting can take place in multiple rounds to first filter the top voted proposals amongst many, and then to select the winning proposal from those filtered.
Commons
incubator
Maintaining a mission globally while not becoming a centralized entity is a challenge faced by cause-based movements, and facilitating the creation of bottom-up local nodes can help solve this problem. We developed the Commons Incubator to fast-track the deployment of CommonsDAOs. It is designed to facilitate the launch of nodes sharing the same cause or on the same chain by providing them with the structure to allow them to move forward on their mission.
The Commons Incubator lays the groundwork for projects that come through the program to successfully launch in 3 months. If done on their own, it would take around 8 months. The incubator guides them through every step of launching a CommonsDAO. The Incubator program will consist of workshops, educational resources and guest speakers focused on the management of shared resources, including policy design, web3 governance and token engineering.