We may be standing at the precipice of a historic moment — a paradigm shift in the way people organize themselves. With the emergence of DAOs founders, developers, activists, artists, and more have come together to launch projects that take aim at a new goal: zero reliance on corporate entities and states.

We believe a first phase of intense theoretical research and DAO protocol development is drawing to a close with the release of the first concrete implementations. However, much remains to be done on the road to mass adoption: not only educating (and learning from) the public, but also testing multiple governance structures to identify useful design patterns and best practices; conducting “moon-shot” experiments; and doing other sorts of research.

To help harmonize some of the chaotic momentum around DAO development, a sizeable group of us have come together to build a Do Tank, tentatively named DAO Incubator. Our purpose is to spawn DAOs (experimental and as well as production ready) and to connect builders, activists, researchers, investors, and users.

We’re also organizing a tightly-knit global network of physical locations where decentralised minds can gather. These hubs will be a great resource for the Blockchain/ decentralised governance space. They may foster:

knowledge transfers

cross-project pollination and integration

fundamental and practical research on behalf of member DAOs and third parties

grant support and match-making

funding for incubatees

the prototyping and deployment of DAOs for communities as well as traditional institutions and companies

We support our incubatees in a variety of ways, including:

mechanism design

mentorship and advisory: legal, soft governance, protocol choice, DAO design, UX and design

grants related advice and applications

partner sourcing

distributed research

development team for designing and building interfaces, modules and integrations

Structure

DAO Incubator, in keeping with the spirit of dog-fooding, will use distributed governance mechanisms as much as possible. Starting from the time of publication of this article we will rapidly open DAOs powered by several of the available protocols.

In order to accept donations and provide advisory for non-crypto entities that deal in fiat currencies we will soon establish an appropriate legal entity as well.

Partners

As a young organism we are looking to interact with our bodies in the ecosystem. We have already discussed partnerships with a few entities and welcome any project willing to join the DAO Incubators vision.

Projects

DAO Incubator has been tinkering with some starting modules and implementations with various partners. Here below the title of a few; we will be releasing details about these projects in our future calls and Telegram chat over the coming weeks and hope to receive as much public scrutiny as possible.

New Commons: model for revenue generating commons with bonding curves

DAO publisher: a DAO that self publishes, prints and dispatches literary works

User-centric DAO interfacing:a proposal to create agent centric distributed governance interfaces aimed at informing the user rather than directing.

OPV / fluid mechanics: a model of tiered voting distinguishing proposals and their implementation

Pando: A decentralized VCS implementation and Git integration based on IPFS & AragonOS

Starfish Network: A DAO for the Starfish blockchain hubs (Berlin, NYC, SF)

Research DAO: an academic journal DAO with decentralized hosting of pre-print servers and incentivization of reviewers

Trojan Foundation: bonding curves for financing the art world outside the scope of traditional finance starting from art centers in Greece

DAO Ontology: Fuzzy Logic for conditional DAO actions

Bankruptcy DAO: compliant liquidation of assets via a DAO

Bundesblock: DAO of the German Blockchain association

The Sphere DAO: establishing a commons of I.P and rewarding contributors starting from a circus and contemporary dance collective

Financial Sustainability

In order to launch, survive and thrive, DAO Incubator has decided on a long term sustainability strategy. First by applying for grants in order to bootstrap the effort. This will make it possible for our enthusiastic troupe of (for now) volunteers to dedicate their time to nascent DAO projects and travel to meet other team members. It will also enable us to hire a designer, legal advisors, and other vitally important personnel. The generic grant proposals will soon be posted on the relevant channels.

For our long term financing, we plan to bring in funds through several avenues:

consulting for non crypto native entities

fungible tokens and non-fungible reputation in incubated DAOs

Investors exchanging currency for a claim on consenting incubatee DAO economic tokens

events management

ecosystem grants

(conventional) grants for entrepreneurial/innovative/tech projects from public bodies (e.g. Berlin, Germany, EU, …)

donations

While our community is open for anyone willing to contribute we have specific working groups chats to maintain a lean structure.

We are currently collectively debating different models to distribute revenue between various contributors to the DAO.

If you have any questions or want to pitch in an idea, please join the conversation on our Telegram channel.

Thank you to all contributors and members of DAO Incubator that are already too numerous to individually name here and that bring through their efforts this dream closer to reality!

I am humbled by your presence and involvement ❤

Special mention to Adam Reese, ontology machine (Beth McCarthy), Cem F Dagdelen, Max Semenchuk, Philippe Honigman and Theodor Beutel for their reviews.

Join us at:

https://twitter.com/DAOincubator