Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are entities that resemble collectives or cooperatives in some ways but don’t have any central points of control. Instead, they rely on various incentive schemes to create cooperation among members of the organization and allow them to work together. We’re not controlled by any one person or entity but rather governed by everyone in our community through consensus. This means we don’t have to rely on third parties like banks and lawyers to process transactions, which saves us money and time. Our members can also vote directly on proposals that impact their lives instead of relying on middlemen who may be out of touch with their needs. Our Framework People can establish Decentralized Autonomous Organizations governed by their choice of code, but the core functionality and infrastructure of the DAO itself will need to be built on a framework that can direct collaboration at the human level. This is where the McDAOnolds Standard DAO Framework comes in. We’re releasing the Standard DAO Framework we wrote as open-source so that anybody wanting to construct a transparent organization with governance and decision-making systems crafted to encompass a broad set of human values and ideals can do so easily. You can use this as a foundational starting point, copy it and evolve it as the beginning of your own DAO. It’s a fully decentralized, leaderless framework for building DAO(S) with the following features:
- Multi-tiered voting structure where anyone from member to the administrator to maintainer can propose or retract votes as well as nominate or eject administrators and/or maintainers
- Tamperproof, reputation/trust system to make it costly for malicious actors to try subverting the community’s interests
- Default voting structure that implements liquid democracy with representative democracy as a fallback if necessary
- An approach for a configurable token system with quick and efficient distribution based on the contribution of value/labor