DAOs and distributed governance frameworks (like holacracy) became a passion for me back in 2017, so i was doing a small research on the subject. My connection with the dgov started from Tim Bansemer's tweet on the plan to do the conference on the subject. That was the time I understood I want to participate and help to develop this on a global scale.
The Conference
In the summer of 2018 we've started the work on the dgov conference in Athens, which was planned for December. Scope of the conference was 3 days for 600 people, with over 40 items on the agenda and 3 separate spaces. While we managed to acquire a lot of top class speakers and some sponsorship, we missed the goals on funding and attendance registrations. This can be connected to several reasons:
- Lack of addressable community (wasn't developed at that time)
- Market conditions with crypto winter and decline in demand overall
- High barriers with the location and price for a new event (possibly just my opinion)
- And of course lack of previous experience in organizing the conferences of such scale and decentralized+remote was slowing us down.
So around 2 month before the event we decided to postpone it, until those conditions are resolved (current idea is summer 2020).
Community Building Meetups
Meanwhile through our work we've attracted some followers in the social media and in our mailing list (around 200 contacts at that time). So we started to do the field overviews with a monthly newsletter. This projects continues and the audience has almost doubled since then.
Also wanted to publish a report for the conference on the current market state, researches and activities, which took a form of #dgov wiki. As it was a huge task, so we've tried to involve the community to help with this. Initial telegram chat that we've created for this has grown from 5 to 170 (at the time of writing) people. Some conversations that sparked there were really brilliant.
Also from the first meeting dedicated to discussing the wiki, we've seen a huge desire of the community to connect and discuss topics on a deep level. Since a small meetup during EthBerlin, we started more almost every month. Probably the biggest event was in Prague during the DevCon 4, where we got guys like Vlad Zamfir, Satiago Siri and many more great minds that cared about the topic (around 30 in total). Inspired by this success we've started to plan a bigger event (dgov council) which happened in Jan 2019 in Berlin.
So it was only a start: time to setup the teamwork, analyze the ecosystem and do the first steps. 2019 have already brought great results and future of the movements is exiting!
DAOs and Digital Coops Research
With a team of enthusiasts and experts we created an international community around the ideas of distributed governance. Dgov foundation connects people to discover practices, implement technical solutions and create complex, scalable governance systems that create cohesion and allow people to flourish.
We took a trending concept of DAOs in crypto (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and collected a wiki that is used by practitioners and scholars who are tackling this hot topic now https://daoresearch.dgov.foundation/
Part of the research was also coming through the meetups and conference we held like this node at Web 3 Summit