Loomio
Sat 8 Feb 2020 4:29AM

Should Social.coop start a DAO?

NS Nathan Schneider Public Seen by 58

One of the things I'm most hopeful for about Social.coop is that it might continue to be a testbed for new experiments in cooperative technology. Already we have the first (that I know of) cooperative instance of Mastodon and are a pioneering example of a Virtual Coop. Here's another opportunity.

Ori Shimony of the blockchain-based tech co-op Dorg has offered to set up a DAO (distributed autonomous organization) for Social.coop with their technology. This could be an alternative mechanism, alongside our existing mechanism, for members to join and participate in Social.coop. Ori writes:

For social.coop, I could launch a simple DAO with any interested participants as equal voting members. Then they could vote on proposals to add new members, and manage any funds that were put in the DAO. We could start on testnet so that no one has to purchase any ETH.  I’m not sure if that will be of interest to a group that’s not actively managing funds, but let me know what you think.

We are actually actively managing funds:)

What do y'all think?

ST

Stacco Troncoso Mon 10 Feb 2020 5:53PM

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.

ST

Stacco Troncoso Thu 13 Feb 2020 6:11AM

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.