You're reading State of the DAOs, the high-signal low-noise newsletter for understanding DAOs.
Many of us have heard some version of “decision making drives results”. While the premise of this phrase is simple — how an organization makes decisions affects its performance — measuring the ways in which communities make decisions is notoriously difficult.
In traditional organizations, decisions-making processes tend to be centralized. Contrast this, of course, to decentralized communities where the regular mantra is that decision making is more inclusive and hierarchies are flatter. And while this may be true in a relative sense, it’s equally accurate to say that DAOs are ripe with centers of soft power.
Understanding decision making in decentralized organizations requires that we measure the relative influence of community members. To do this, researchers at RNDAO have created the Spread of Influence score to measure soft power. As Katerina writes this week, “[t]he Spread of Influence score gives the community a sense of key influencers, whether the larger member base is disconnected, and in general how discussions are undertaken within the community.”
In assessing the results, “[w]hat one should look for is an optimal score, which promotes participative discussion but does not hinder the speed of decision making or overburden members with participating in conversations.” Armed with this information, community leaders can assess the health of a community and take steps to improve decision making processes and help ensure the longevity of an organization.
This week’s DAO Spotlight focuses on Opolis, and organization dedicated to helping DAO contributors thrive, and we conclude, as always, with a TL;DR on some of the most recent DAO ecosystem takes and thought pieces, making it easy for you to cut through the noise and learn everything you need to know about the current state of the DAOs.
Contributors: Katerina, Chameleon, angelspeaks, Quilia, KingIBK, Vi-Fi, boluwatife, Kornekt, HiroKennelly, siddhearta
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Game7 is excited to launch Summon, our novel DAO governance platform.
Summon is a community LiveOps tool that takes governance to the next level by making it easy for DAOs to measure the contributions of their members, and reward them in ways that go beyond money.
How it works: Each community member mints a Soulbound NFT that evolves as the member contributes to the community, making the NFT upgradeable and unique. As each contributor completes quests and tasks, they earn experience points (XP), which help them move up in rank and unlock features and rewards in real time.
By tracking, measuring, and rewarding contributions, Summon provides decision-making capabilities to those who invest time and effort into the community, as opposed to only those who contribute capital.
The result is a meritocratic governance model that distributes power and governing rights to the most productive members of the community.