One of the powerful governance innovations that DAOs systematized was breaking the dichotomous “you’re either in or you’re out” approach to community membership into a more robust and granular engagement spectrum:

One of the key innovations that blockchain technology enables is the ability to easily create ventures that are fully owned (and operated) by their communities, through a community token. In most cases, ownership of the community token doesn’t just provide access to the economic upside of the venture but is also the primary mechanism to influence the most critical decisions: on-chain governance decisions assign a community member a certain number of votes that’s proportional to the number of community tokens that they hold.

As collaborative work becomes more digital, its digital footprint becomes a meaningful source of insights into the health of the collaboration and ways to improve it over time.

In recent years, a unique organizational pattern started to emerge on the progressive end of the corporate sector, reflected in companies like Haier, Zappos, and Buurtzorg. The companies applying this pattern operate in different industries (electronics, retail, healthcare) and originated in different geographies and cultures (China, US, Netherlands). Simone Cicero at Boundaryless, alongside peers from other organizations, gave it the mouthful of a name “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organizations” or E3O for short.

Humans have collaborated since the dawn of civilization. The modern firm, on the other hand, is a relatively new phenomenon, only a handful of decades old.

I’ve been meaning to write about individual READMEs and “user manuals” for quite some time and I’m glad that I held off.