Build your own Fun DAO
January 30, 2024
At Ethereal Forest we take it as our duty to spread the twin ethos of decentralization and direct democracy, to energize people’s sense of the organizationally possible and to awaken people’s capacities for coordination and commons self-management. One of the best ways we can do this is by evangelizing the web3 tool of p2p-enabled, low-overhead spontaneous organizations that we call DAOs with their now vast library of composable inputs for radical democracy and participatory economics.
In accordance with this mission(opens in a new tab), Ethereal Forest has seeded Fun DAO PDX, a low key onboarding project to give interested friends (and strangers) in the Portland community a chance to join a DAO, learn an ever revolving set of novel coordination tools, and meet some friends-in-affinity in the process.
It began last month, where (at the challenge of some community members from the EthPDX meetup circle) we set about the task of designing a simple, low impact onboarding DAO that could provide incremental exposure to the web3 toolset without requiring the time or information commitment that many DAOs do. People have jobs, obligations, but they also have an innate curiosity about their powers to act(opens in a new tab), about the technological horizon of their powers to act (which has, in our opinion, always been the question of democracy).
The premise of a Fun DAO is simple: Every month the DAO decides on a group outing in town. The outing could be just for fun - a soccer game or a park barbeque - or it could be purpose driven, like a community garden volunteer day or a Depave(opens in a new tab) event. (It’s our expectation that the direction of Fun DAOs will drift over time to reflect their communities). Most importantly, each cycle the DAO uses a unique coordination tool to decide on the outing (e.g., jokerace(opens in a new tab), quadratic voting(opens in a new tab), conviction voting(opens in a new tab)).
The goals of this formula are to:
- Provide a place for novices to join their first DAO and see how it works.
- Provide a place for novices and veterans alike to be continually exposed to new mechanisms that might help them in other projects.
- Provide valuable feedback to the teams building these novel onchain tools.
- Provide a place for community members to have fun while getting to know each other, and potentially brainstorm other projects and workgroups (in our case, with an eye toward our goal of generating a diverse and pluralistic PDX DAO(opens in a new tab) ecosystem).
Fun DAO is effectively an education DAO. Deciding where to venture out is obviously a job that a group chat could solve, and following our allegiance to the appropriate technology(opens in a new tab) thesis, we want to be clear that the goal of this DAO is exposure to novel coordination tools for their own sake, so that they can be applied by community members at scale to larger, more meaningful, and more appropriate projects.
Fun DAO PDX had its first outing on Saturday, January 27th, to see a free art show at the Oregon Contemporary - Georgie Friedman’s BREATHING–LIGHT. Our first outing was decided using jokerace, where the art show beat out indoor golf and Multnomah falls, among others. Though the DAO only has 10 onchain members, the outing’s attendance was fifteen, with newcomers joining to say they don’t yet understand how to set up a wallet but would like to be included. To this end the DAO coordinated dedicated onboarding hours (hosted at Ethereal Forest’s affiliate community space, Bridgespace) on the second Tuesday of every month, complimenting our EthPDX meetings which occur on first Wednesdays.
All in all, this first cycle onboarded a handful of community members to self-custody wallets while being the first experience with jokerace for many more of us. The next cycle is likely to use Pairwise(opens in a new tab) voting through General Magic, though that will be up to the DAO - post-first cycle, Ethereal Forest has ceded stewardship.
If you have a radical new coordination tool you’d like Fun DAO PDX to try, hop into the DAO’s telegram(opens in a new tab) to let us know about it. If you’d like to join, you can do the same or simply show up to learn more at the monthly EthPDX(opens in a new tab) event.
If you’d like to start your own Fun DAO, fucking go for it!