DAO tools — built on web3 — now give us the ability to design and manage incentives to maintain positive-sum relationships between stakeholders, keeping them aligned on shared goals as the product or community grows.

1. How to lower the barrier to meaningful contribution

tools that qualify and quantify different types of contributions (e.g. bounties, DAO-specific metrics) can be used to create a shared understanding of priorities of how one can expect to be rewarded for different levels of participation.

2. How to maintain operational efficiency as they decentralise

Progressive decentralisation enables an initial team to search for product market fit on its way toward credible neutrality.

3. How to coordinate decision-making at scale

Crucial to these decisions will be information that is relevant and accessible. Analytics tools and data aggregators play an important role in making DAOs human-readable, surfacing meaningful insights from raw on-chain and off-chain data.

While many responsibilities overlap with those of traditional organisations, the core difference (and value proposition) is that opportunities to contribute are open. Anybody can take the initiative and make proposals to create new working groups or change the way things are run.

Decentralisation doesn’t mean leaderless. Rather, more people are empowered to take initiatives towards shared goals: the DAO’s North Star.

Ideally, the contributor journey fosters a growing sense of ownership and belonging such that the individual wants to grow with the community and make a larger impact towards its vision.

bounties by themselves are insufficient to drive individuals to take on more ownership.

Reputation as proxies for trust helps people allocate their attention within the DAO, it also tells outsiders who to approach when they need support or want to explore partnership opportunities.

Web 3.0 allows individuals to port their identity and reputation across applications and communities.

HR is one of the most under-addressed verticals for DAO contributors. There is a huge opportunity for projects to offer individuals a web3-native solution to handle “meatspace” benefits like health insurance, 401ks, IRAs, and tax compliance.

The next generation of governance tools will bridge the gap between off-chain voting and on-chain execution — offering a layer of checks and balances to ensure that execution, even if initiated from a multisig, actually reflects the outcomes of an off-chain vote.

Challenges in DAO treasury management are now to provide more transparency into its asset allocation and spendings in order to assess performance and financial health.

Learning from the current limitations, the next generation of DAO frameworks (which include updated versions of earlier ones) focus on modularity, flexibility, and extensibility.

Unlike the more monolithic, rigid first-generation frameworks, modular and composable tooling flexibly serves the ever-evolving needs of communities.

the ecosystem of DAO plug-ins will grow akin to that of open source software packages.

Much of our mental models for organization design today is a legacy of assembly line-centric workplaces of the 20th century. Innovation around DAOs will also take unlearning outdated ideas of how human coordination can work.

the web3 organisational tool stack will accommodate many-to-many relationships, fluid participation, and crucially ownership.