I believe many American small towns and counties, and yes, some rural electric cooperatives, do a very good, and sometimes great job at governance. I participate with all of mine frequently. I have my disagreements, but largely, it works. The lights do stay on. The engineers have mostly good intentions. The politicians keep each other in check.
I disagree that good governance is zero sum. I agree that at the global level, presently, the game theory is different. And I agree that establishment America has many shortcomings. Notably, Balaji’s Network State is an argument that Bitcoin’s blockchain changes the game theory of even the global and American game. With truth publicly auditable, the game has changed.
I am proposing an experiment to make DAO governance more like governance that goes on in small towns across America every day - but we must condense and focus because everyone in the Web3 community is working on 4 different things. AND DO IT ALSO ONLINE.
To reiterate. Today, at the hyper local level, there are already lots of good incentives, smart people, and medium transparency and citizen oversight. It already works, I am just replicating and bringing the conference ONLINE AND IRL, and in condensed format. The price proposed is a maximum. And again. The ROI is infinite. Good governance is the flywheel. Without it, the treasury will merely be slowly siphoned off to zero. See eg., SBF.
A little more about me. I am an 35 year old attorney in my local community of ~3,000, Red Lodge, Montana. This past June, we had a 500 year flood that took out several bridges, and many private homes (including one of my family’s). At the time, I was sick with a fever out of state, unable to fly home. The outpouring of volunteerism in the time of crisis was breathtaking. Tears in my eyes seeing people step up to the plate. Our government officials worked around the clock. CityDAO could soon provide a similar level of digital crisis response to its citizens, if it could get its shit together. As I was recently hacked, I can tell you that the first DAO to offer cyber assistance to its members, will grow…
The year before the flood, we had a fire, to which our collective branches of fire fighting government responded to amazingly well. I helped evacuate hundreds of homes, as I and others had trained to do. I am also a member of our local Fire Department and Sheriff Department’s joint Search and Rescue Team. Our training and technology is some the worlds best. But we have much we could do better.
I believe with a Web 3 backbone of energy, data, and dispute resolution management, we can make transparent governance and crisis management an evolutionary step closer to perfect. What I imagine does not presently exist in other DAOs, that I am aware of.
Raising money is not the bar to good governance.
At Permissionless, the consensus was that the only successful DAOs to date had started centralized to raise money, and were moving to decentralization, but most had not figured it out. We are in the same boat. Figuring it out costs money.
The age old problem of governance has been theoretically solved, by the blockchain. Now it merely needs to be overlayed on historical successes of IRL gatherings, and covid created hybrid life.
Happy to speak with other “sufficiently decentralized” DAOs that have raised money, tomorrow, if you can point me in their direction. (https://variant.fund/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Sufficient-Decentralization-by-Marc-Boiron.docx.pdf).