shazow on Warpcast

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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/cryptoleft

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

If your "DAO" makes you negotiate with token holders for fair pay, decent working conditions, or to modify your working agreements.. You don't have a DAO. You have a boss.

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shazow pfp

How should a DAO work?

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

There's no one answer, but I think most people should agree that it should be: - Decentralized: Not concentrating power into the hand of those with the most wealth, over others with less wealth - Autonomous: Not forcing participants to accept domination by other paries through coersion or withholding of resources - Organized: Not a chaotic stew of influence and politics, but a structured, comprehensible system for collective action. The methodology I use an advocate for is to build operational daos (where people work to achieve shared goals) as purpose-aligned networks of small, autonomous teams in which working groups are engaged voluntarily as sovereign entities with 100% of needed resources (or as much as practical) provided upfront upon engagement, agreeing on only the enabling constraints neccesary for each party to commit safely and and with reasonable affordances. Not "decentralizing" key business functions onto an army of unpaid laborers whose surplus labor value accrues to token holders.

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shazow pfp

But that sounds like you still have a boss? We're just redefining a boss as being all the participants. It's not like a DAO should let me simply take whatever compensation I choose to have and do what I feel like.

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

That's not a boss, it's a counterparty. I'm saying we *shouldn't* create dynamics in which the token holders hold coercive power over workers, but engage them as autonomous teams and Guilds, with fair compensation negotiated upfront. That's not a boss. It's a client.

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shazow pfp

(Farcaster nit: If you reply-chain rather than doing each reply to the original cast, it'll order/thread better.) I think we need to better define what it means to have a boss? An employment contract with a boss is an upfront contract too. We can have clients who underpay and aren't fair. I think we're fundamentally aligned about what we want here but we need better terms than "boss"/"client" IMO. Also we shouldn't undersell how hard it is to build consensus within a cooperative (or DAO). It's still made up of people, with agendas and pet causes and greed.

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

Lol noted. Thanks. By "boss" I mean someone who dictates the terms of an agreement in a one-sided fashion. Employment contracts are rarely negotiated (and when they are, it's usually by threat of withheld labor en masse), they're dictated by those who hold the most resources. Both bosses and clients can be decent or shitty. The difference is economic coersion vs. free association. Good point re: cooperatives. Many cooperatives act as general assemblies of members which in many cases (above two-pizza scale or so) are prone to coordination failure... But there are many types of cooperatives, like worker, member, producer, retailer, buyer, consumer, etc.. There's no one-size solution. Picking the right one is key. Generally, a collaborative workgroup, or a con/federation of collaborative workgroups, is very easy to coordinate with few rules and a reasonable amount of supports. Just look at dOrg.

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shazow pfp

Got any links to read more about how dOrg is designed and scales? I don't really agree that employment contracts are inherently coercive, but I will grant that the market conditions (especially today) create space for coercive agreements. It's more related to whether it's a "buyers vs sellers market". We can imagine a world where some kinds of labour is in such high demand that they have a lot more power over negotiations (e.g. software engineers in the previous decade).

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

Sure, totally agreed on that. The thing itself can't be divorced from its material conditions. In a different world or time, employment contracts might not suck so much.. But here we are with 99% of resources held by the wealthiest 1%. dOrg scales like we do at SuperBenefit, by supporting autonomous teams who earn their own money and decide on their own working agreements. Here's their member handbook: https://docs.dorg.tech/

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shazow pfp

> The thing itself can't be divorced from its material conditions. I agree, I just don't see an obvious generalized solution yet that isn't anchored in abstract fantasy (if we simply coordinate paying everyone fairly, it'll all be great!). UBI would be powerful, but I don't think that can be DAO-first. Self-contained internal economies are powerful. Debt cycles are powerful. I'm on a leadership group of an old DAO and we have had a lot of resistance (from a very vocal minority who is ideologically opposed) around adding fair compensation for work to advance the DAO's charter, but there's no active source of revenue, it's kind of an investment DAO with a modest treasury of assets just sitting around. I imagine it's easier to allocate compensation if it's incredibly wealthy or has an active sustainable stream of revenue (though not sure how to prevent long-term degrading/capture without an benevolent "executive director" figure). Another good example similar to dOrg is Spearbit.

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I guess what I'm asking is: Have you seen any good writing on how to get a DAO "from 0 to 1" in terms of fair compensation rather than relying entirely on voluntarism (to profit shareholders)? I wonder if it's only possible for some specific categories of cooperatives, or if there's a good generalized playbook.

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rathermercurial

@rathermercurial.eth

Daos should also be resistant to capture. If folks aren't helping to earn revenue and execute on commitments, they're raiders, not contributors. In general, labor negotiation is about finding an equitable arrangement, not producing a utopia for laborers. Most workers are happy to find middle-ground and are reasonable, *unless* they've been taken advantage of and/or their needs aren't being met relative to their time invested. Both sides (capital and labor) should be strong, sovereign, and well positioned to negotiate with each other as peers. Neither side should have the upper hand if the system is to be healthy. (ofc IMO capital should be held in common by all workers with no special status for non-worker contributors, but it's up to each group to decide on their preferred mode of production) Thanks for the tip! Will check them out

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