Should Social.coop start a DAO?

I don’t see problems to use Daos & Disco each franework has his functions. daos can be used to save funds and allocate resources of the coop, disco can be the framework pf how to behave and the values to follow. Anyway Disco is also something quite theorical for me cause when it commes to real legal life it has to be defined as a Different entities in each country a user forms part. the good research for me should be how a community driven DAO can help discos . Even if disco creators think daos are evil. Join the enemy to control him.

i use blockchain in my day to day live with wallets and dapps and i don,t se devil there. We are the Devils when make bad use of our talents. Big hug

@Nathan Schneider I strongly recommend to everyone to read the DisCO Distributed Cooperative manifesto at disco.coop.

It is a well developed set of values and principles and procedures to operate a DAO with cooperative values, it is also a very good critique of what is wrong with traditional DAO culture and structures and how to make it better. I would also suggest that we not use Ethereum but use our own blockchain-based on our values and not be subject to a speculative currency like Ether. We mostly trust our members for the use case for a DAO for us is not strong, because a DAO is for a trustless architecture amongst those that do not trust each other, although we are trusting a lot of people and platforms like this platform.
I do recommend that we help The Guerilla Media collective and @Stacco Troncoso in developing their system to use as well. I am still in the process of understanding the governance model that they have been using successfully to operate their distributed Coop, but it is something we should emulate if we really want this distributed cooperative social media platform to multiply and scale with coop values.

Edit: the website was not loading so I attached it.

https://cmci.colorado.edu/medlab/2019/10/20/stacco-troncoso-disco.html
@Nathan Schneider's interview with Stacco Troncoso

+1 With the crew of resco.io we are focused on find the best legal framewoek for open a coop in Catalunya and then maybe in Buenos Aires with inspirations like the Fairshare Model and the Disco model, understanding DAOS like a piece of code that can automate few processes related with value accounting and tokens issuance. That values are already in the DNA of our mission

This is a sidetrack, not meant to distract from Nathan's helpfully provocative question which is about DAO, but how about a Social.Coop Reading Group session on the DisCO Manifesto? It seems like a number of us are wrestling with it and could benefit from sharing of questions and thoughts...

Great idea. Consider combining it to do a bit of fundraising for Social COop through WeCo grant :). For every user who takes part in the discussion, we donate 1$ to Social Coop :).

I would join a reading group session on DisCO. There’s a lot to read, and what you see depends on what you read. These two will give quite distinct senses of what DisCO feels like -
https://wiki.guerrillamediacollective.org/index.php/Distributed_Cooperative_Organization_(DisCO)_Governance_Model_V_3.0

https://disco.coop/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/DisCO_Manifesto-v1-1.pdf

The Model3.0 is sober, a working spec, for operational use. The Manifesto is very colourful, evocative, tilting at windmills. Read both? Or if just one, the Model.

I would be interested too, I've spent the last two or three weeks on-and-off working my way through it, following the many many links (and more links from those links, etc... computer slowing down with all the tabs open), and making notes, etc... (and only got half way through! I'm kinda slow...).

This thread was where I first came across it.

great thread

I found this interview useful for the commons and p2p background, and the relation to M15: https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-68-stacco-troncoso-the-commons-is-the-glue/

@Nick Sellen - I understand the difficulty of managing the research, tabs, and reading. It took some 10 or more hours to read through the manifesto while going through the links, but I did finish it but still need to read the governance model details and learn more about CAT.

Tangentially, I use Tabs Outliner chrome extention which also works in the new brave chromium-browser. It lets you make an outline of tabs and makes it easy to suspend tabs from the memory, it helps me organize thousands of tabs. I also save each article I am reading to Pocket and OneNote. This makes it so much easier to keep track of everything I am reading and with limited RAM. So I have basically a massive annotated bibliography of articles, links, websites, books, and clips.

I have sensitive eyes so, for websites and articles, I use "Dark Reader" ext. and "Reader View" to get white text on a black background, otherwise, I would not be able to read so much on the screen. I read the manifesto in the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, with the accessibility option for white text on black and, ergonomically, on a 22" HD monitor.

@Matt Noyes - I would definitely be interested in doing a reading group. Where/how should we continue this branch?

@Leo Sammallahti - Yes, let's make a branch on WeCo for cooperative governance and distributed cooperative governance and the Disco Model if there is not one.

For the reading group, I can start an interest poll in the Reading Group here on Loomio and share it on Social.Coop, followed by a time/date poll. We can then figure out how to integrate a WeCo thread/branch. We will also have to decide which text(s) to read and on which to focus since it is a lot of material.

I use Tabs Outliner . . . save each article I am reading to Pocket and OneNote . . . limited RAM . . . massive annotated bibliography

Also tangentially - but related to reading? . . In Firefox I have the OneTab plugin, it’s OK. I’m not keen on Pocket, definitely unkeen on MS OneNote (it’s MS) and have quit using Evernote: too oriented to corporate cloud usage and rubbish at formatting of notes - so I migrated to Devonthink 3 (MacOS). It’s proprietary, paid-for and a bit geeky, but it is built like a proper toolbench. Massive annotated bibliography, yes. Sadly the computer still doesn’t read things, and the bibliography and backlog just get bigger every day! RAMwise, even with OneTab I still keep half a dozen pinned tabs in Firefox and a dozen in Safari: they’re constantly in use and help to maintain a visual sense of context. So there goes some RAM! I’m not a fan of a super-clean minimalist hacker-aesthetic full-screen display, I want some lived-in clutter, some colour and the desktop wallpaper (grass trees sky, water) showing round the edges else things get claustrophobic. ;-)

Thank you so much for bringing devonthink to my attention, it is way better than what I was doing. I remember reading about it like 10 years ago while reading "Where do good ideas come from" by stephen johnson, but I did not have a mac back then and I forgot about it. thanks, @mike_hales

Hey, we love the idea. We wanted to do a general reading group. We'll be glad to chime in and we can direct other folks reading the Manifesto etc to the reading group. Another idea was to make a forum here in Loomio called DisCO.talk. Would anyone be up for that.

Hi @Stacco Troncoso :) I'd vote for less Loomio groups actually... they come with a price now and whilst I'm happy to pay Loomio for a great platform I actually think some of these conversations, and attempts at collaboration would be better with more people in one main forum where we might possibly be more effective. I see so much cross over between the intentions in The Open App Ecosystem, Commons Transition, Social Co-op, Platform 6, Solidfund etc etc groups... but little actual coordination... let alone collaboration. But don't let me stop you, I'm sure A DisCo talk thread would be interesting too... but I'd love to talk more / work with people here, and other Loomio groups, about how we might use the tools at our disposal to more effective

This is a good highlight @Oli SB . I hear the same issue coming up all over. On the Left it’s been an issue since the socialist-feminist Beyond the Fragments was published 40 years back, but the situation’s more severe today, with identity politics fragments and the bubbles that are enabled by social media. If we could find a way to move forward on this one, it would be a big contribution.

What platform/s might serve? And what core topic or theme might embrace the diversity, without constituting yet another fragment?

My hunch on topic is commons (commoning). Eg DAO vs DisCO could be addressed as ‘how can each contribute to the practice of commoning in this or that community’ (app commoning, credit commoning, commoning of coop knowhow, etc) and ‘what commons may they contribute to the current repertoire’ (ie commons of digital means, of digital media, of coop knowhow, etc). OAE, Commons Transition, Solidfund, etc etc are all approaching these questions, I would say. It would be great if we all talked to each other about this tacit convergence? I’m not suggesting that ‘commoning rules’. Just, this is a tacit mode of practice across all these fields.

My hunch on platform/s . . less sure. Maybe a good old fashioned wiki, and a good new-fashioned federated wiki farm. Social.coop is in the (hesitant) process of defining what the distinctive ‘core content’ is, of the discussions we mean to facilitate in Mastodon and Loomio (probably, the development of coops?). We could host/moderate a segment of a larger wiki, which is the wiki of the broad grouping Oli is proposing? We could share fedwikis on various strands of developing thought & practice? Maybe social.coop should host a Mediawiki and a fedwiki farm, alongside the Mastodon instance - each under coop governance?

Not a competitor or duplicate of the P2P wiki. Rather, a domain-focused sister platform, alongside the generic P2P platform.

Note: this doesn’t amount to coordination or collaboration of real-world action, which is probably what Oli was intending. So maybe some other kind of platform for that? Although . . . isn’t that what Loomio is designed for?

Wikis need a synchronous channel alongside too: chat of some kind (text, audio, video)? Mastodon?!

Went ahead and started a thread and poll in the Reading Group

Interesting as it is to experiment, I’m not convinced that we would currently benefit from setting up a DAO. Personally, I am more interested in DisCO if we are looking to broaden our horizons and strengthen links. Also, if we are considering managing funds on a blockchain, my feeling is that we should look carefully at which one, as many appear not to align with our values.

I think the qustion should be: in which way can tools/processes from the DAO space be useful for social.coop? We've been looking into creating a DAO for the Vanilla Way Network, working with some folks from that space and I am following the DGOV movement since a few months. I understand that at the current state, it does not replace a legal form yet, there is a lot out there in beta, and the question is really what we would like to solve/do with the tools available or possible to design. I love the idea of a DisCo reading group. I also recommend you guys interested in that topic to join the DGOV community (https://dgov.foundation), that is full of people thinking of Distributed Governance beyond Tech, and people from the blockchain space interested to collaborate with "real" communities to test their tools.

Hey there. So, from the DisCO angle, we're just wrapping up a separate project but eager to build on what we've done in the Manifesto. I'll chime in on the next few days to talk about some of the points raised.

Now that the reading group has been created, I'll simply give my impressions on SC as a DisCO.

I think that @Nathan Schneider's proposal above calls for a very simple DAO reflecting Social.coop's present reality and formalising some of the value flows therein. DisCO, on the other hand has been primarily designed for worker coops or WSDE's, while Social Coop is something else.

I think that a lot of the cultural practices we propose (and use in Guerrilla Media Collective) can be introduced to SC but it may make more sense to pilot Ori Shimony's proposal above and then figure out what elements of the DisCO Framework are applicable to Social.coop.

On the latter: For us DisCOs come into being when the seven DisCO principles are being used (in addition to the OG-7 coop principles) .The worker-owner angle affects DisCO principle 6 ("Reimagining the origin and flows of value") mainly, as it currently calls for paid/market work to self finance the pro-bono side. That market angle is the factor I see missing in Social Coop, but I think it'd be interesting to explore its DisCOfication in its absence - once of the purposes of DisCO is to increase decommodification so hey, totes worth looking into.