A DAO Operating System

I read through a16z’s predictions about what will happen in crypto in 2024. My biggest exception is I didn’t see a discussion around how AI agents and LLMs can be used to build a “DAO Operating System” which I view as one of the most interesting potential applications in 2024.

Building a viable, working DAO Operating System should be possible at this point. I would like to try to prototype it myself, but there needs to be some more ideation around what to do in my opinion.

Crypto communities tend to get way more active when there is potential for a token or liquidity. That may be next year, or it may be years away given the state of the economy. In this article, I will simply try to outline the basics of what a DAO Operating System powered by LLMs might look like.

Observations About Where DAOs Fail

DAOs fail for the same reasons all organizations fail. These might include:

• Lack of engagement
• Lack of onboarding
• Lack of accountability
• Lack of consistency
• Lack of leadership
• Lack of incentives

My personal experience is that when I join a DAO or other Discord server, things quickly go downhill. There is a lack of engagement, lack of onboarding, lack of orientation. Most people are largely left to their own devices, there is rarely a sense of shared mission or community and in most servers, the experience is highly transactional and random.

In theory, this work is primarily left to community managers. In practice, there are still major gaps because many who join the community either dont know what to do, or they lack a clear incentive about why they should help or even how to help the community or organization.

It should be possible to attempt to build a sort of “Community Operating System” that takes over some of these functions.

A Basic DAO OS

I have a design here for a very simple DAO Operating System that makes use of an LLM, treasury and objectives.

I believe that a simple DAO Operating System which does the work of maintaining a continuous state of engagement can have a significant impact on the functioning of a decentralized organization.

In particular, I see opportunities around how communications, ideation can be done. I believe that using LLMs, prompting and some clever scheduling and design work can create an autonomous organization that can move, set, ideate, engage and achieve goals better than the discord communities of the past.

Behavior of the DAO Operating System

Below are a list of behaviors I think a DAO Operating System should have:

1. Encourage people
2. Highlight people’s work to others in the community to motivate participation
3. Remind people on a semi-regular basis in a gentle way, help people overcome roadblocks and brainstorm through problems
4. Give people ideas about things to do in order to add value to the organization
5. Organize meetings and groups automatically to lower the barriers to doing so
6. Take notes with AI and remember, log organizational goals
7. Accountability on a per member basis, get members to agree to take on small pieces of work and engage with them to keep them on track

None of these functions are out of reach of modern LLMs today.

Servant Leadership

In my opinion, the end goal of a DAO Operating System is to act as a selfless servant leader and attempt to channel the collective objectives of a group of people.

This can be done through nothing more than a few basic tools:

• Continually ask people a series of strategic questions designed to make them think, elicit ideas and generate new opportunities
• Remember the answers to these questions and form them into a sort of accountability plan to track again
• Steadily remind people of the direction things need to go in
• Give people small, actionable ways to contribute and then highlight their work for the group
• Potentially provide tactical spot awards or other bonuses out of a treasury for doing work

In my experience, people will participate in a DAO if the work is rewarding, meaningful and if they are asked to do small amounts of work. Unless people are being paid by the DAO or have a major stake in it, there isn’t much incentive to work for free.

A DAO Operating System would need to use a combination of strategies and methods to get people to work together.

This could take the form of applying and using a library of prompts plus input on an ongoing basis from members.