One of the critique people have about DAOs is its inefficiency. Too many people helping can dangerously mean no clear leadership and ownership in direction and accountability. Research suggests for a DAO to hit 5-10% contributor rate is already top tier. How does Bu Zhi DAO have over 50% contributor rate with external contributors jumping in all at the same time?

In this article, I want to write about our DAO structure, what goes into planning a conference, how a DAO mobilizes to achieve such a tall tasks, the learnings from doing this as a decentralized unit, and how we are making history in Taiwan.

Structure

We use a pod structure in BZD. Conference pod is one of the pods which encompasses many sub pods. There are 3 types of members: pod leads, contributors, and members. Each have different level of responsibility, expectations and accountability:

• Pod leads

  • Point of contact for each pod

  • Plan pod roadmap for each season

  • Delegate work to pod members, give ownership.

  • Set meeting cadence and run meetings with pod members

  • Onboard new pod members to your pod

  • Participate in high-level DAO infra and planning

• Contributors

  • Join a pod and contribute a few hours a week on project you find interesting / DAO needs help with

  • Follow through on projects committed to and stay in sync with pod lead and other pod members in case bandwidth situation changes

• Members

  • Stay up to date with DAO happenings as much as you can

  • Become a contributor when you have bandwidth/interest in any of the projects

  • Welcome to come up with any ideas you like and start contributing

  • Attend town halls/meet-ups/hangouts if you’re free!

For the conference pod, similar structure as Bu Zhi DAO, we have a clear leader in Tiffany and break down each vertical as sub pods supporting the work streams with a clear lead.

The sub-pods are fluid where whenever a new high priority need is identified, we quickly find the relevant people, create a telegram group chat, add it to our master list of work streams and expect updates on our weekly meetings from each sub pod.

Contributors

We welcome any (public) contributors to join sub-pods! A ton of people have reached out and started volunteering their time, effort and connections to help us. Finding contributors has always been a pain point for many DAOs. Even for BZD when we first started, differentiating who plans to be passive members vs active contributors vs pod leads takes time and a lot of work to align everyone’s interest, bandwidth, motivation, skillsets with DAO / pod needs and open positions. How do you encourage more members to become contributors when the DAO isn’t paying anyone for their work?

A few things that’s helping us:

• Strong and clear mission - show people a why and they will find a how

• Concrete goals - the conference itself and every work stream have extremely clear concrete goals that needs to be done

• Simple onboarding - make it painfully easy to see everything at a glance, high level overview, point of contacts, chart of group chats and workflows

• Actionable meetings - have high signal and actionable meetings, status updates can be done async, keep the meetings high value discussion and super actionable. “We’re here to discuss X and do Y.”

• Transparency - reduce information asymmetry as much as possible, turn on and open all chat history, have a master document and list of chats people can join to find information.

• Check ins - frequently check in with each lead and their biggest worry and pain points before they become problems.

• Celebrate - celebrate every milestone, new partnership, and highlight everyone who contributed loudly! 🎉

A lot of people spend time studying tokenomnics and incentive structures on how to best motivate people. End of the day what we find is people don’t care and just want to contribute because they like the mission and vibe with the people. Trying to pay people, counterintuitively completely changes their mindset, specially if it’s below their market rate, they will immediately de-prioritize it or even feel insulted doing the work. The idea of doing meaningful things with folks they like is all people really need.

Learnings

Planning a conference as a DAO naturally has its trade offs. It’s take a bit longer to set up as there’re more moving pieces to organize. Luckily we started in June before any hint of the quarantine and border opening because this is something we felt strongly about and wanted to make happen no matter what. Now the infrastructure and ground work in place and we are counting down 11 weeks, all engines are steaming and we’re trucking full speed ahead. The news of borders opening and quarantine lifted also supercharged our momentum.

When there are many decisions to be made, DAOs can be at risk for taking longer to come to consensus. Ultimately a do-ocracy mindset is very powerful - whoever is willing to step up and own the work will have the biggest say and autonomy on how things are done, granted it aligns with the big picture, is properly communicated, and can be delivered. You need a good balance of do-ocracy and meritocracy to find the right person to get things done and help make decisions in a DAO. Ultimately, we haven’t had to do this but you can always do a vote if needed to finalize decisions. Crowdsourcing ideas and different views usually turns out the best for something like this. What Vitalik may call a concave worldview in his article on DAOs.

The huge advantage of planning as a DAO is you have so many more ideas and unique skillsets that have room to shine and people to step up for what they want to do. With a large member base we have of 70+ across Taiwan, New York, LA, SF, London, Japan, Europe all working in different roles in web3 and have a keen interest in Taiwan, we have a large and deep reach to any useful resources we might need just from within our members that has come in super handy.

As a DAO, we can also be neutral with any affiliations. We can work with every L1 chain and are not tied to any narrative or limitations in who we can collaborate with. We have a lot more freedom to work with selected high integrity and mission aligned partners.

Conclusion

With 11 weeks to go, a lot of people have been asking how we are doing this as a DAO and how things work so wanted to shed more light and visibility and celebrate the amazing progress we already made! The biggest surprise so far has been so many people seeing our mission, work and integrity and decided to put their full weight behind us asking for nothing in return including media partners, government agencies, friendly projects, companies and passionate individuals.

We knew planning a conference wasn’t going to be easy and was going to be a ton of work. But nothing beats seeing it for yourself first hand and getting your feet soaked. This is our first conference, but we feel more prepared and charged up for everything than we’ve ever been. Relationships take time to build, but the friendships and partnerships we’re making along the way is already extremely fruitful - with so many collaborations beyond the conference we already see possibilities with mission aligned partners.

Planning a conference as a DAO is an extremely fun and empowering way to do it. We have a lot more work to do, and will welcome any support and help if you align with our mission - to grow and bridge the Taiwan web3 ecosystem with the world. This is an open invitation to join us in making history in as the first ever DAO planned international conference in Taiwan.

Shout out to Tiffany for leading the conference efforts and all our contributors, members, public people, agencies, projects taking our calls and expressing interest in supporting. We cannot do this without you guys and can’t wait to see you all in Taiwan!

List of people who have been superstars including non BZD members (yet) :

Rinnie, Jolie, Andy, Hsing, Oliver, Ray, TK, Will, Tmoc, Jesse, Eefy, Blues, Allen, Wellington, Cin, Kevin L, Meesh, Daniel, Kevin Y, Daniel, Wei, Jessie, Derek, Antonio, Sean, Thomas, Nancy, Karen, Nat, Mike, Tracy, Darren, Justin, Stamford, Kfei, Sun, Hao-Ping, Cal, Daniel, Frank, Vivian, Liz, Tommy, Ivan, Tina, Richard… and very likely a lot of people I am missing!