Quantifying Governance Maturity in DAOs

Transcript

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah okay awesome well thank you guys um I'm Marcos um I'm the head of product at a stable lab um today I'm going to be talking about governance maturities in Dallas uh we will explore how we how we can quantify this and what we learn in this process and hopefully enable both dials and The Wider web3 ecosystem to actually make

more informed and insightful decisions and improve their decision making processes so yeah let's start by as like just like facing it dials are really complex uh at first glance uh it's kind of it's It's they kind of they are similar to a puzzle in my opinion um you know one of those like have like over a thousand pieces and they're really really difficult to to actually put together and I think this complexity actually comes from their unique form so dials are in in its Essence they are like uh a mixture of different elements uh you have contributors you have a stakeholders you have community members um and each one of these elements they

have different needs they have different objectives and they even have different perspectives and what happens is that this all of these elements they need to collaborate and coordinate with each other and this forms a governance system that doesn't work that that works without the traditional hierarchies or the traditional structures that you might see elsewhere right um so this makes the dial governance process something that is not linear it lacks those like clear-cut decision making processes and paths that we see in conventional organizations where you have a single leader or a group of Executives that make the final calls or take the like make the decisions right instead thous they re they require a minimum share consensus consensus and

this usually is leaning a lot on intuition and personal experience this lack of Reliance on quantitative data and empirical evidence leads to an approach to decision making that is really something subjective and not not objective at all and to make this even more complicated um we don't have a Playbook we don't have a guide on how to actually take tiles from something that is not decentralized to something that is really decentralized um so it's not it's not a highway it's not a direct path it's more like a maze so you have a lot of twists you have a lot of uh turns and also a bunch of dead ends

um so we added the stable Labs we we've just felt that we needed a tool that could help us understand this complexity uh to be able to elicit insights from Dallas and and be able to start understanding how that process to towards the centralization works and perhaps hopefully help them in that process so that's uh basically what we try to build here uh and so this is like we design or we we build that meter and down meter in its Essence it's a framework for analyzing and measuring what is like the the maturity of a dial so we try to provide comprehensive

insights into the organic organizational structure of different vowels and their governance process we examine it and we evaluate several of these dimensions and key aspects uh that makes what a Dao is and how they govern and they operate um and we believe that this type of analysis is actually a great first step um into getting this really valuable view into what are the strengths and what are the weaknesses of the house and how we can actually help them get to a better decentralization or a better or reach that ideal of decentralization so um we understand Dow maturity as a

connector it actually works as a bridge a bridge that links the current state of a dial with what is the highest what what is the Dallas Highest Potential this concept of maturity it's far from being something that is uh that has a single dimension in in in in a position in encapsulates a multiple app aspects that go just beyond just like there where come on there you go uh they yeah okay okay having some technical issues there there you go well we'll see if that works um then uh that go beyond just decentralization it's about what are the

processes and the procedures that thou put up in place in order to operate it's about how they manage the resources but it's also about how thou members are able to effectively contribute to the ultimate goal of the Dao and how that actually that relationship between contributors are Dao has established um so we try to build down meter upon these two ideas um and we use a combination of an approach that has like both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to ensure that we were like having a complete analysis um and this actually allows us to maintain a balance between numerical data that we got from on-chain and

off-chain sources but also insights from the context of each specific dials and all the dials that we talk with uh during this whole process um there you go so we identify six big areas or six uh bay categories that that help us Define what Dow maturity is the first one here is proposals and basically it covers if the dial has a process for that preliminary discussion about the proposal and whether this proposal data is stored on chain or not and what is the actual process to discuss a proposal right then we have a community so communities basically how it's How how the Dow

organizes the community basically does the Dow has community stores how frequently The Tao reports to the community and how contributors like do they have like a compensation system for contributors how do you like how the dial actually rewards contributors or community members we also analyze the voting process so this is more like how deep voting actually happens what are the elements that make the voting effective well how the voting Powers is distributed are the user nav custom voting tool or they are using like a standard tooling that it's available out there um next we have documentation and this is basically center around transparency

and access to information it's about what are the documents that the dollar is producing to communicate with the community what is the documentation that is available about the protocol about the dial about how the dial operates about the tokenomics that that everybody can access freely to actually understand how this how these procedures and processes actually uh happen in the dial then we have security and this is basically analyzing whether the Dao or the protocol in itself they have a security model that is centralized or decentralized um do they have regular audits um do they ever face a major loss of funds and like somebody is there a guy that has the admin keys that could

actually be a threat to to the dial and the protocol and finally we evaluate also the treasury like how the product the protocol manage its treasury um so each one of these category has a lot of many like many soup categories and this is how the expanded list actually looks like so if we were to evaluate let's say Dao XYZ we will take a little a look at each one of these items and then we will assign them um a point uh um based on on how the how well they did in each one of these subcategories um and of course not all the same have this not all these categories have the

same relevance we Implement a way a waiting system to make the most important categories actually matter more and and have a highest impact in the final score then we basically with all this we aggregate all the data and we produce it we produce a score um in why why this matter why are we doing this basically well there you go um like I mentioned at the beginning dials are complex so I think that it's very important for us as a community to start developing those tools and Frameworks that enable us to actually deal with this complexity and and informal decision making processes not only at the low level but also as an

investor or as somebody that like an interest party that wants to start contributing to other it's important to have this information available in a way that is digestible on a second node it's also we also think that it's important to have a way of comparing two dials and this is not only helpful for um for for investors or people trying to to to join a Dao it's also helpful for Dallas themselves as having that score it's setting the foundations for their future decisions it enables adult to actually understand where they are standing right now and how they can actually progress in the future towards their their objective health decentralization so so far we have evaluated 30 over 35

dollars uh it took a little bit of time and you can see you can find all of these reports available in our websites they're free you can just go in there and you can access the report and you can see how how well they did in different categories that I mentioned before um but also this process of going through over 35 hours and receiving their feedback we would we we got a lot of feedback and we learned a lot out of the process not only about what makes a dial tick but also what are the limitations that we identified with our current framework so in the first place there's an intrinsic diversity to dials and this made us realize that there isn't like a one-size-fits-all approach um not all the dials are going through

the same things and they are not operating in the same context but we don't see this as actual well it is a limitation but we see it as an opportunity an opportunity to further developer develop this Frameworks so we are continuing so we are able to learn more about those and how to understand them um going further we got a confirmation that whether whether like maturity and decentralization are really closely together related they they work in tandem these Concepts concepts are not the same uh adult can be highly decentralized but be very mature and the opposite is also true you can have a very mature dial but it would have with high centralization and this actually

brings us to my the last learning um it's like we understand maturity as a Continuum it's a bridge from the present to the Future however this definition of maturity is actually evolving with time what we thought was a mature dial two years ago now is probably somewhere in the middle and in the future we don't know what is the mature Dao would look like so this this means that we we need to be continually improving and iterating over this framework in order to be able to provide the most value so yeah that's um that's pretty much it we can say that those are still really babies like they are in this in its infancies and we still need those tools to have to help

us get like get through the complexity and start and be able to to to start making more informed decisions and make them help them get to a more decentralized uh space we've seen that even though like we we should we sing with the current market that a lot of dials they actually realize that they need to become better at decision-making processes they need to be better at managing their resources in order if they want to survive the River Market right however this actually is a really exciting times because it means that we have now the opportunity to develop tools and to develop Frameworks that actually can help them Reach the new like the new bull market so to me it's it's only up from here um so yeah well thank you so much that's

pretty much it um yeah here you have my socials if you want to know more about stable Labs what we do or about down meter feel free to scan that QR code we are also looking for delegates so if anybody is interested feel free to reach out um and yeah I don't know if anybody has a question yes yes yeah yeah

that's actually a great uh it's a great question so I think that the process itself we we kind of started by trying to we we use this framework from Nicholson to actually Define the taxon the taxonomy of an informational system right and we we iterated over this taxonomy several times we did a bunch of surveys we approached a bunch of those and we actually took us guinea pig the dolls that we were already collaborating with stable lab offers professional delegate service so we have a great relationship with a bunch of dials and like top tier dials I would say so that actually put us in a really good position to watch to to reach out to them and start having access to this type of information um and we kind of selected the dials

that were mostly aligned what we think are the most relevant thouser are probably D5 dials or nfts and gaming dials L2 dials and L1 dials um so that's like the first part the second part how how we cannot update this like how we can keep it fresh uh well that's something that we're still trying to figure it out um as we know it like it's really time consuming because you need to go through a lot of information um but it's also a back and forth uh there is a benefit to the dials to actually get the score you know not only because they give them uh like a like I mentioned before like a foundation to to understand where they are where where they are right now and how to to improve moving forward but also it's like they

we get we get in this Loop in this relationship like hey we changed this is this like something that we could do to update our score and make it better and we are also like iterating over our own framework initially we have like how many we're like over 50 categories do like and we we start like strapping like removing categories and dimensions because they were not sustainable in the future so yeah that's pretty much it all right um I think that we run out of time yeah yeah okay we're good all right well thank you so much guys [Applause] [Music] [Music]