DAO governance can be scary. We know. Some of our proposals receive standing ovations, some were met with violent disapproval, but one thing is for sure — there is no better place to directly impact the direction of our space than in the depths of DAO governance.

So, dear reader, if you are on the fence about jumping in and contributing to DAO governance, let us encourage you with a hearty: “LFG!! 🚀”

This piece will give you an overview of the tools of the trade, and how to use them well. As a dedicated governance group, we participate in more than a dozen DAOs. Governance contribution is our daily bread. This post represents our best practices and is meant as a starting point for new contributors and as grounds for discussion for experienced pros.Let’s start from the beginning. If you already have experience with DAOs, please skip the first chapter.

What is DAO governance?

DAO governance is the process that steers a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Due to its decentralized nature, DAOs should not have central leaders, at least in theory. In practice the founders and the most active members shape large parts of the agenda and thus what gets done. This is especially true during the early startup phase where the founders do everything.

As the DAO evolves more and more contributors pick up tasks and start shaping the whole operation. DAOs are much more fluid than traditonal companies, and influence is easier gained, and lost. One main difference to traditional organizations is that other members or sub-units cannot be forced to perform certain tasks.

*Source: Rune Christensen — *The DAO Singularity

DAOs have different checks and balances in place than traditional organizations. There are no command structures besides the smart contracts that make up a DAO on-chain. There are no executives who can order others around. Instead good, well-argued proposals convince others to take action.

DAO governance wants to create and support a thriving network that fulfills its mission. How the network achieves its aims and how governance works are wildly different from one DAO to the next. If you compare SushiSwap with MakerDAO, you can see two very different modes of operation but two very successful products.

Should you participate in DAO governance?

Since we work in DAO governance, we can only emphatically say: “YES!”. DAO governance is an exciting, diverse, and influential occupation that allows contributors to expand their network, be at the cutting edge of developments and make a name for themselves.

The actual activity and the overall pace of governance are not for everybody, though. The better question would be to ask: “Who should participate in DAO governance?”

When recruiting contributors for Flipside, we look for these qualities:

• Strong communications abilities, both written and spoken
• A quick grasp of situations and the ability to act under pressure and considerable uncertainty
• Fast learners with a deep understanding of the ecosystems
• Some background in history, philosophy, or behavioral sciences

Governance, especially in later stage DAOs, covers huge swaths of topics, and contributors are sometimes required to vote on every issue. While “Abstain” is a valid vote, it is a far better look if you have an opinion you can express. It is important to be able to grasp an issue quickly, then do the necessary research and come to a conclusion. Good communication skills entail the honesty to be clear about what you know and what you don’t know. This way your opinion will be understood in the right context.

A lot of governance is about relationships, and humans relate to other humans based on trust and respect. Some contributors use anon accounts and put out great work, while others publish under their real name. Suppose you want to stay anon, fine. But please do the whole space a favor and refrain from using your anonymity to bring everybody down with snide comments and hate. This is a net negative in Web3. Don’t be that person.

Good, transparent communications that reveal strengths and weaknesses help others to build that trust and offer plenty of touchpoints for conversations. We can’t overstate how important this quality is. The concept of honest, clear, and kind communications is simple, but difficult to maintain, especially in the face of adversity or criticism. The ideal contributor is “based”, which means she or he has a solid sense of self-worth and doesn’t feel attacked easily.

Government of Ancient Greece. The chaos and intensity are still happening in DAOs, 2000 years later. Source: savvyleo.com

Tools of the Trade

We’ll introduce the tools we use day to day to communicate our ideas, find the best topics to weigh in and how we make sure we have the biggest impact by making our posts look awesome.

Communication tools — How to make your point

The two main tools of a contributor’s trade are Discord and Discourse. Discord is the de-facto standard for DAO group chats, and Discourse is where more formal DAO discussions occur. DAOs refer to their Discourse sites as “forums”, a word inspired by the ancient Greek ἀγορά (agora), translated as the forum. The agora was where noblemen met to discuss the fate of their nation.

Discord is where informal chats happen. It’s the place to go to get a feel for the overall vibes of a DAO and the easiest way to make friends and form connections. Discourse is where proposals are made, dissected, discussed, amended, and then put to the vote. We’ll go into more detail on voting later. Suffice it to say that the actual voting happens outside of Discourse, for the most part.

We will finish this chapter with a discussion of the most useful aggregator websites that help you find the hottest topics in the DAOs you love.

Research tools — How to find the hottest topics

Messari Governor is a beautiful tool that keeps track of many DAOs and flags interesting proposals. If the DAO you want to participate in is covered, you’re in for a real treat.

Then there is Tally.xyz, a self-proclaimed DAO operations tool, where you can track important votes and proposals. The list wouldn’t be complete without proposal monitoring systems Boardroom and Sybil.

Boardroom sends notifications to your email address when DAOs you follow have new proposals to vote on. Sybil doesn’t support a lot of DAOs yet, but with Uniswap, Radicle, and ENS, a couple of the most interesting places are there. Sybil allows you to follow the activity of delegates across DAOs which is nice.

Tips & Tricks

How to navigate forums and chats

When you join a new Discord server or poke around a DAOs forum, the sheer amount of channels and conversations in parallel can be overwhelming. Don’t worry; we got you covered.

Flipside’s Francis ‘Fig’ Gowen likes to check in to see what’s happening daily to ensure he stays on top of developments. He watches for topics that remain at the top of a category. These are the ones that get the most engagement and are likely to have the biggest impact. Sometimes he looks at the activity of key contributors. That can be like having a local guide you through the mazes of a city you’re just getting to know.

His colleague Ian ‘d0bby’ Dobbins uses the ‘Since your last visit’ feature to make him aware of new issues on the forums. Then he visits the tokenomics and governance categories because that’s where he feels drawn to and where he wants to make the most significant impact. Forum posts are often tagged, and you can search for these tags. But checking into the categories themselves helps to catch the interesting but mislabeled proposals.

On Discord, the best thing is just to follow the chats in channels that you’re drawn to and then make the leap and just write a reply or a post. On most servers, people are welcoming and friendly. DAOs thrive when they can attract and retain new contributors and talent. There’s a built-in incentive for members to be friendly to n00bs. Think of it as talent development.

Both Fig and Ian track engagement to their posts. Fig keeps a Google Sheet where he logs likes on his replies and proposals to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t, whereas Ian checks the likes in the Discourse notifications.

Making your posts shine

This chapter will give you a quick overview of making sure your posts shine and stand out from the competition. Since Discourse and Discord are two very different animals, we’ll break this chapter into two subsections. This chapter is the most practical and hands-on in this blog piece. We encourage you to put it into practice right away and get active in the DAO of your choice.

Getting great at Discourse

The most endearing quality of a post is originality and concise, good writing. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to get attention. Basic spell checking, writing, and rereading a forum post before firing it off and a clear, positive intention go a long way.

‘Fig’ Gowen uses Google Docs to craft proposals or longer replies, as he can use Google’s spell-checking and Grammarly there. Ian Dobbins types his replies directly into Discourse’s post editor, and makes ample use of the preview to the right. Grammarly also works in Discourse and keeps spelling bugs away.

But the single most important question to ask yourself is: “What am I trying to achieve with this post? What do I actually want to say?” Okay, those are two questions, yet closely related.

Above is a screenshot of the Discourse editor. You can see Grammarly’s icons in the bottom right corner of the Editor, telling me that the overall feeling of my blog post is neutral, and I have one grammatical error, namely a missing comma after “right”, underlined in red.

You can use basic HTML tags like <b>** your text here** </b> or the Markdown language for Discourse post formatting. This blog post has all the details you’d ever want to know.

The Markdown codes we use the most are:

• ## for an H2 heading. One # sign for H1, three for H3, …. You get it.
• ** for bold ** and * *for italic **
• Lines starting with a hyphen — become a bulleted list
• Select passages from other posts and click on “Quote” to insert part of another post for reference
• [Link description](https://hyperlink.here) inserts a descriptive link into a post

Good structure helps break long proposals into blocks that are easier to digest and understand.

Concise, expressive writing is a skill that needs to be constantly honed and evolved and is what separates good from great contributors. A well-written proposal with good structure, a clear takeaway, and a positive character is more likely to pass than a rant in spaghetti text. It pays to give your proposals all the love they need to have their best chance of succeeding. Here’s one prime example of a Discourse post that’s superbly written and shows deep research, courtesy of TJ Ragsdale from MakerDAO.

Tons of likes are not always the best measure of a great proposal. Sometimes inconvenient truths have to be expressed. These are unlikely to garner lots of likes but can nevertheless have a formidable impact.

Sparkling in Discord

Discord, in comparison, is a much looser and faster medium. Spell checking is done on the fly by Discord and should be heeded. But of course spell checking flags a lot of fun, colloquial language like “HODL” or “jeez”, too.

The most important thing is to ask yourself what you want to say, and what you want to achieve in an interaction. We’ve said that before, but it’s worth repeating. Everybody gets hundreds of notifications and messages to read. Make it worth their time.

Make it about them, not about you.

Discord allows users basic font parameter changes like bold or italic text, blockquotes, and monospaced code, plus green, red or blue text color. This blog post has all the details. Key features that we use:

• * your text* makes the text italic
• ** your text ** makes the text bold.
• > your text inserts a blockquote, and finally,
• ‘ your text ‘ formats the text as code

One handy tool is a Discord Timestamp Generator, like this one. Since DAO contributors are in different time zones, using timestamps makes life easy for everyone. Timestamps display in the local time for everyone reading the message — no need to calculate UTC.

For example: This message contains a timestamp <t:1656954000:F>,gets displayed like this:

Formatting in Discord is useful when submitting detailed replies. Otherwise, a firm grasp of emojis, memes, and GIFs will help you stand out from the crowd.

Moving the ship — How proposals get passed (or not)

If you followed the last section you should be comfortable with navigating governance channels. Let’s discuss how to get stuff done. For the DAO to do something, a proposal has to be put forward and accepted by the community. Only then can the necessary resources be made available.

Proposals are often surfacing in Discord first, usually in the form of an informal temperature check, to discover group sentiment. If the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative, then these concerns have to be addressed first. Putting up a proposal will only result in negative comments and it will definitely not pass, in that case.

You can jump into these conversations and start steering the DAO. Humility and openness about gaps in your knowledge help to avoid awkward situations and will make sure your questions are answered. Getting started in governance is really that easy.

If the author of a proposal feels they’re getting positive feedback on their idea, they will take it to another level. Before a proposal gets put to vote, it sometimes undergoes a formal temperature check on a DAO’s Discourse forum. These are called temp checks or signal requests. At this stage, the proposal is already somewhat complete and formulated. Registered users can vote Yes, No or sometimes Abstain. Some forums require users to participate for some time before they are allowed to vote, in order to avoid bots and other nefarious activities.

An ongoing signal request in MakerDAO’s Discourse forum that we voted YES on.

After a signal request, the next step is the formal vote on the proposal. Sometimes the vote happens in Discourse and sometimes on custom websites, primarily if token-weighted voting is employed. Occasionally polls are held in Discord with the help of chat bots. Other tools used are Snapshot for voting and Coordinape to distribute rewards. The latter two work off-chain, so activity there doesn’t incur transaction fees, making participation feasible for smaller token holders.

Let’s take a closer look at Snapshot first and then take a quick stab at Coordinape.

A closer look at Snapshot and Coordinape

Snapshot allows users to vote with their tokens. To participate in a vote, a user needs to have the tokens in his wallet, namely MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Portis, and every other wallet supporting WalletConnect.

If you do not hold any tokens, you cannot vote. This is on purpose, as most DAOs feel that only those who are affected by a vote should be able to participate.

Below is a screenshot from a somewhat contested vote on BanklessDAO. We can see that icedcool.eth, one of the core contributors and developers of BanklessDAO is the host, and a user with the Discord handle links#7868 championed the proposal.

The proposal asks for funds so that Season 4 of BanklessDAO can be funded as discussed.

The actual discussion leading to this proposal has already taken place on Discord and on the forums. Snapshot is simply the voting booth. The vote ran for one week, and a quick look at the times reveals that the vote was centered on Eastern Standard Time. The author is on GMT, which is EST+5, and the vote ran from May 3, 2022 12:00am EST to May 10, 2022 12:00am EST.

The final voting result is written to the Ethereum blockchain, at block height 14,702,090. Snapshot does not store votes on the Ethereum blockchain, because storage there is extremely expensive.

Instead it stores the votes, which are messages signed by the respective users’ wallet, into the Interplanetary File System, a decentralized cloud service.

We can see that the vote passed with ~82% of the tokens delegated to the For vote, ~15% to the Abstain vote, and 3% to the No vote. Token holders can sometimes vote on multiple options if the vote allows that. Then a holder can assign a percentage of their tokens to the options they favor respectively.

Yes, No, Abstain votes usually limit the options to one only.

Some DAOs have their own front end for on-chain voting. Token holdings are usually required to participate, and token weights are added to determine the outcome. Here’s a screenshot of MakerDAOs voting page, as an example:

We want to mention that there are DAOs where proposals have to come as smart contracts, to make automated proposal execution possible and is closest to the true definition of an autonomous organization, where execution is not dependent on any one member or group. Voting can happen without a guy by calling the respective smart contracts, and some DAOs require this level of technical expertise.

Coordinape is not strictly a voting tool, but rather it’s a tool that lets community members distribute rewards or payouts to contributors in a cool and fun way. It features a great UX where members can select others and decide how much of their share of proceedings they want to allocate to others. Coordinape is a fun, game-theoretical experiment: members decide whether to spread their tokens as thinly as possible to maximize touchpoints and promote themselves or distribute their tokens to the few key members who provided the most value. We don’t want to get into more detail here. This blog post has more depth if you’re interested. Let us finish this section with a screenshot from a fully progressed Coordinape round. Lines represent allocations. Circles represent contributors.

*A full-on Coordinape round. Lines are allocations. Circles are contributors. Source: *DeveloperDAO / Twitter.com

What makes a contributor outstanding

The measure of a good contributor is their impact on the DAO. Ian Dobbins suggests working on having a presence out there as the priority, showing up, proposing good ideas, and not being afraid to voice disagreement. Being a “Yes man” who constantly fawns over others is not likely to make you many friends, nor will it lead to an impact. Being on top of issues and chiming in is crucial.

Following voting requirements is another sign to ensure your participation is up to par. Some DAOs measure participation, and regular contributors get reimbursed for their efforts. Get votes on your calendar and be active in the forums because sometimes, missing a single vote can mean you forego the rewards for that month.

‘Fig’ Gowen sees a good understanding of the broader ecosystem as a hallmark of an outstanding contributor. Primitives are often translated across multiple ecosystems and can help grasp the interaction between DAOs and protocols. Knowing about the Curve and Convex dynamics helps understand what’s happening with Saber and Sunny on Solana, for example. Contributors with this foundational understanding can point out best practices and showcase where similar experiments have already been done and what results have been achieved.

Both Fig and Ian agree that being able to formulate opinions and voice them in concise writing is the single most important skill for a contributor. Having a unique voice makes posts relatable and identifiable.

Ultimately DAO governance is a social activity first and foremost. Relatable contributors that can bring value via thought leadership and research will always have an impact, especially if they can voice their opinions well.

Conclusion

We hope that this blog post gives you the tools and understanding you need to go out there and play. DAO governance is a great place to meet smart people and impact the development and direction of products you care about.

Getting influence in a traditional company would mean being hired for an influential full-time position. DAOs lower the barrier to entry. Even new contributors can have an impact when they submit deeply researched and well-written proposals that offer solutions to current issues.

We wrote this post partly as a reference for ourselves but hope it inspires you to participate in decentralized governance and helps you to be the best contributor you can be. If you feel like you want to leave your mark in this space we’re always looking for sharp pens and bright minds to join Flipside Governance. Please reach out to us.

Source: blog.izadesign.com