Foreword

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you talk about community DAO? Is it voting? Is it full community activism? Or is it a project of creativity incubated by the community?

These are vital, but not the essence of DAO.

The REAL goal of DAOs

DAO, as a form of organization, is superior to traditional organizations (e.g., corporatism) in that it allows people to collaborate fully as individuals, fully reducing the cost of trust between people, rather than viewing everyone as part of a fixed team.

That is, a DAO is not a goal in itself, it is a collaborative model adopted by a group of people who are unknown to each other in order to achieve the same vision. If a centralized organization can make this group of people more efficient, then DAO is not the best choice.

In short, we adopt DAO because DAO can give fuller play to each person's potential than a centralized organization, maximizing the overall benefit, and ultimately making the community reach the vision with maximum efficiency.

Therefore, when we design a DAO, the primary consideration is not how decentralized it is for the "political correctness" of the crypto world, nor how rich the community activities should be to make the community members FOMO, but to start with a very clear vision, attract people who really share the vision. It's about starting with a very clear vision, attracting people who really share that vision, and then designing a system to make that group of people strive for the vision asap.

In short, the essence of a DAO is to "get a group of strangers to run to the vision as fast as possible".

How do we design our DAO:

So how did Saanhoi Club design its DAO ensuring that we could "bring a group of strangers to the vision as fast as possible"?

First of all, we should be very clear about our vision:

An imaginative community to build a series of derivatives such as brands and games starting from the ancient texts of ShanHaiJing to rebuild and develop an innovative Shanhaijing meta-universe in the Crypto world.

So what we want to do is to gather all the people who are drawn to the vision as much as possible and focus everyone's efforts on achieving it. For this purpose, we have designed 3 periods to progressively become decentralization:

• Team governance period
• Core DAO governance period
• Fully decentralized period

Team Governance Period(Jan. 2022 - July. 2022)

In the startup period, the team will be the most important player in decision-making for maximum efficiency.

In the earliest days, there were no rules of engagement, no detailed description of the vision, and no community culture, thus rushing the community to full autonomy would lead to a large group of people without a sense of direction. There’s no way for the whole community to move in one direction. At the same time, there were not certain criteria to judge right and wrong when disagreements were encountered, which would likely lead to the bifurcation or even the demise of the community.

Therefore we adopted the team to have absolute control, and the team will single-handedly finish everything and show it to the community members.

I'm sorry to say that although we are a DAO, we have to adopt a centralized approach to governance at the beginning. But centralization is about real decentralization. We need to make sure that when it comes to autonomy, we can achieve true autonomy, rather than apparent autonomy but no real control by the users. So we have to be careful enough to make sure that we are moving in the right direction at the beginning.

We welcome members who disbelieve in us at this stage to wait and see and to actively participate in the process as we gradually go full steam below. If there are objections to what the team is doing at this stage, we welcome comments or suggestions. If at any point in the process you believe the team is doing something that has deviated from the vision, you can also withdraw or fork.

Governance Goal

The core governance goal of the team governance period is to clear the vision, basic rules, and products. Making every user entering DAO clearly knows how DAO wants to do and how to participate in the future.

In short, the governance goals are the following four points:

• The construction of the governance framework
• The articulation of the vision
• The design of the collaboration mechanism
• Launch of the first generation of products

Decision-making mechanism

We divide DAO members into the following 3 categories:

team, CoreDAO members, other DAO members.

1. all DAO members can make comments (on a dedicated page)
2. CoreDAO members can see all the comments and discuss them in the CoreDAO channel
3. the team makes the final decision based on the content of the discussion

Core DAO Governance Period(July. 2022 - Jan. 2023)

When the team has built up the basic framework, governance rights will be gradually released by the team. The core DAO consists of the team, early supporters, KOLs, etc.

At this stage, our focus is to gradually improve our governance mechanisms through the testing of the core DAO, such as voting weight calculation, voting incentive mechanism, community internal work contribution measurement mechanism, etc. These mechanisms also will eventually form community tools and lay the foundation for true DAO autonomy.

Governance objectives

• Establish a great CoreDAO-subDAO operating mechanism
• Product upgrade and iterate, subDAO start to produce results
• Gradually form DAO culture

Fully decentralized period (Jan. 2023 - ∞)

It is our ultimate goal to really get everyone involved and let each member have real decision-making power.

At this stage, the Saanhoi DAO ecology will be generally prosperous, with brand co-branding, peripheral products, on-chain games, series of NFT, meta-universe Saanhoi-verse construction... The whole Crypto world is full of SaanhoiClub.

We will start from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, with imagination as the core, and incubate one amazing product after another, initiated by the community, operated by the community, responsible to the community, and contributing profits with the community.

The core team will decentralize core decision-making and project ownership to the community members. Then a largely parallel organizational structure of all SubDAOs will be established to achieve full decentralization. Critical responsibilities such as fund management and project collaboration will be handled by different SubDAOs, such as Finance DAO and BD DAO. The whole community may have matters in multiple directions advancing at the same time, working on Shanhaijing research, building houses, designing games, and arts, etc. Different SubDAOs can interchange problem solutions and use the same meeting system or incentive system. And all are moving toward the same goal, building a new world of Shanhaijing.

Governance Goals

• Phenomenal prosperity for the Saanhoi ecology
• Proud to be a member of SaanhoiClub
• SaanhoiClub will be the first on-chain, fully community-developed and successful DAO in the Crypto world

Decision-making mechanism

• All SubDAO members can initiate proposals related to this SubDAO(e.g. members of BD DAO can initiate BD DAO proposals)
• All DAO members related to the proposal can vote on the proposal
• The proposal will be automatically executed when approved.

Afterwords

Saanhoi Club co-founders, as team members, despite having bounced around several DAO-focused projects since 2019, we were disappointed at most of the DAOs in the end. Their DAO attributes only stay in their names. A community is not a DAO just because of the voting mechanism, nor is it because of how well-known their members are, or how many investors are bullish. A community becomes a REAL DAO when its members can clearly know what vision they are joining for, and know what they are doing and how the vision is connected, and in the DAO's collaborative model, they can bring out the efficiency that traditional organizations cannot do. A DAO of such is what we have a consensus with. The Saanhoi Club, although it does not have DAO in its name, will be the first, new, future-proof DAO.