Subscribe to William Mougayar's Blog
>800 subscribers
Yesterday, I participated via video link in a meetup that was held in Barcelona, on the subject of Blockchain Backed Governance Systems, and was invited by Carlos Barbero Steinbock, co-founder and CEO of BTC-Guardian. The program included other speakers from DASH, Bitsquare, a lawyer (Adam Vaziri) and an impromptu appearance by a Slock.it co-founder, who originally brought us The DAO.
The video replay of the meetup is available here, and I kicked off the event, with a talk entitled Success factors in Distributed Organizations Models.
Here’s where a video link where my talk starts:
And here are the Slides from that talk.
William Mougayar - Success factors in Distributed Organizations Models - Barcelona Nov 25 2016 from The Business Blockchain
I ended my talk with this single slide, emphasizing that the “Autonomous” part of DAO’s is what scares me the most. While it is a critical element, it should not be taken lightly.
In hindsight, it was that Autonomous part that took down “The DAO” last June. Too much autonomy was entrusted into fledgeling smart contracts, and the process took a turn that was humanly unstoppable (except via a hardfork which is a non-natural blockchain act that happens on an exception basis).
Autonomy seems to be a stubborn goal of DAO’s, as zealous engineers want to give power to their smart contracts, just because money, business rules, responsibilities and decision-making can now be programmed all together in a big mashup.
But I want to caution that Autonomy comes in different flavors, mainly separated into two aspects:
Autonomous Governance
Autonomous Operations
Autonomous Governance pertains to how the consensus politics or mechanics of a given blockchain are evolved and managed. And it also pertains to the scope you give for such governance in terms of the resulting actions.
Autonomous Operations might be easier to achieve initially, and it relates to automating via the blockchain some aspect of existing operations, via collaborative decision-making for example. To uncover use cases for this segment, think of the decisions that you currently make that require voting or participative voices from within your organization. You can integrate the recording and enactment of these actions with blockchain-based workflow capabilities.
Regardless of the flavor of autonomy that you’re thinking about injecting into your DAO or even ICO’s, you need to think about the scope of impact for the resulting actions, and more specifically endeavour to simulate how this autonomy might work by running in parallel a non-automated version first.
]]>
15 comments
>99% of human coordination is subjective, which public blockchains cannot parse at all This is why "DAOs" use traditional human governance methods which have nothing to do with blockchains (except for accounting, which is the only objective thing) Ironically, if "DAOs" were autonomous, you wouldn't need "DAOs"
There are ways to use blockchains / smart contracts to implement subjective coordination. In fact, one thing that makes DAOs unique relative to any other org type is their ability to enforce their own rules with the full spectrum of enforcement from constraints/objective/prospective to accountability/subjective/retrospective. These mechanisms and patterns are just starting to emerge, and it’s an exciting time.
It's not possible because smart contracts are strictly objective - we know this from the thousands of DAOs over the last decade which require exclusively human input into all subjective matters The only way is if there's an AGI coded into a smart contract, but blockchains will be obsolete well before then anyway
I could have been clearer. I didn’t mean that blockchains or smart contracts can, without human input, execute subjective logic. What i do mean is that you can use smart contracts to autonomously run objective rules for how humans engage subjectively, and that is a hugely under-rated innovation and an (increasingly less) under-explored design space.
So you don’t buy the meme that AGI would prefer to operate on blockchains rails because of their universality, security, programmability, etc.?
Agreed! 100 $daos
100 $daos Sent. You have 900 remaining
They would evolve as cybernetic orgs?
I think I disagree with your last statement, but it might be a misunderstanding. Autonomy = self-empowered. No one else is in control of an individual's actions or output. I'd argue that it requires a DAO to actually enable non-violent coordination between autonomous individuals. Blockchains are also required because we need a credibly neutral data layer to enable accurate accounting of subjective input from these autonomous individuals. Without that there has to be a trusted executor who gathers and carries out the wishes of contributors, therefore removing the autonomy. If humans were capable of autonomy then sure, we might not need DAOs. But like @spengrah.eth was getting at, Blockchains and DAOs are what enable us to automatically execute the collective actions of autonomous individuals through credibly neutral consensus. Without that, someone with a stick has to enforce execution, and that is inherently not credibly neutral. Subjectivity isn't the issue, just tooling and process definition.
Oh I get it now. If "DAOs", as a personified noun, were autonomous then we wouldn't need them. DAOs aren't autonomous, no. The contributors are autonomous (or that's the goal for me). The "DAO" is just the combination of tools, ledgers, and workflows that a collective group have agreed to use. A DAO cannot be autonomous in so far as an organization can't create itself. Rather, the DAO simply enables autonomous engagement through decentralized structure and automation (smart contracts). Maybe someday AI can create a DAO and we can actually say the DAO itself is autonomous, as a structure. But I think the goal to be achieved is for individuals to be autonomous in their contributions, rather than the abstracted concept of the organization itself being autonomous in its own self-management.
Great dialogue!! 100 $daos
DAOs = delulus
you can't govern without good faith and compromise, and you shouldn't. you're making a good point :)
Yup. They often conflate autonomous with automated. Automated is easy. Autonomous is not. I have written previously about this aspect. https://wamougayar.xyz/daos-automating-governance-or-operations
Challenging train of thought, but yeah, I can’t contradict you…