Farcaster

1/ I was reading up on a friend's research paper. While the authors viewed top down hierarchies as hard to design and enforce, many DAOs view top down hierarchies as ideologically undesirable. There are some fascinating insights. A thread ⬇️

Independent, original thoughts. Onchain interests. Investor, entrepreneur, best-selling author. Cultur3. MetaCartel Ventures DAO. Opinions are my own.

3/ The authors' answer to the question was that organizations are better off with rather than without top down hierarchies. There's some nuance though.

4/ First, even when top down hierarchies are not well designed--even randomly selected--organizations are better off with hierarchies than without them. Same is true when top down hierarchies are not just well designed, but not well enforced. 

Pretty cool, right?

5/ Now who does the enforcing of a hierachy? A designer, or summoner or community leader in DAOs. Interestingly, the paper argues that while a central designer or community leader is useful, the designer must not be intelligent or have great enforcement powers. So why do we need a designers at all?

6/ Because designers force people to meet. Meetings create a dynamic where people are more likely to take action than otherwise, which fixes errors of commission rather than omission.

7/ Simply put, meeting useless people causes you to do more than failing to meet someone valuable, e.g. changing who you interact with to achieve something productive.

8/ So what? Perhaps every DAO should have a formal structure. Someone must enforce this structure, no matter how intelligent that someone is. The why is so people meet each other, with the biggest benefit being meeting useless people--or, more precisely, because of what people do because they met useless people.

9/ Conclusion: DAOs should have a formal structure. No matter how bad. Have one. DAOs will be better off because of it.

2/ The authors' basic question was whether top down hierarchies (i.e. formal structures) are needed in organizations. This question maps well onto many discussions about DAOs, even thought the authors were not, at the time, aware of DAOs afaik.