By Griff Green and Kris D

In the Giveth ecosystem, a DAC is a Decentralized Altruistic Community.

What does this mean exactly and why should you care or become part of one? Let’s start by defining the terms.

Decentralized: There are no central points of failure.* The cause, which the DAC is organized around is what matters, not the leading organizations or egos. A DAC has the ability to build their own decentralized governance structure in whatever way they want, using whatever platform they want, or they can even have no governance structure at all.

Altruistic: The causes a DAC focuses on are usually the ones that are marginalized in the current profit-oriented market economy, such as helping the homeless, funding open-source software projects, or supporting emergency relief after a natural disaster. The main point is that the DAC’s aim is not focused on generating profit for a few, but rather on using #Blockchain4Good and trying to #MakeTheWorldABetterPlace for all.

Community: A group of individuals and organizations that share the same values and work together to achieve common goals. They communicate through a social platform (like Slack, Rocket Chat, Discord, etc.) and use Giveth’s smart contracts to transparently allocate financial resources with a high degree of social accountability.

The DAC is the primary building block of the Giveth Donation Application.

The Giveth DApp (Donation Application)

Presenting the Giveth DAC

The Giveth DAC building the Giveth DApp

We, the Giveth DAC, develop the Giveth Platform to enable Decentralized Altruistic Communities to come together in support of a common cause. We strive to model the DAC concept as one of the first non-profit blockchain based entities.

We are Altruistic, we are entirely open-source and love to reach out proactively to similar initiatives, which we see as potential collaborators as opposed to competitors. The Giveth DAC works with volunteers, and genius developers who are working for a fraction of what they could be earning at for-profit Ethereum projects.

We are a Community. The individual members of the Giveth DAC call themselves Unicorns and are a rag tag group of white hat hackers and social pioneers trying to make the world a better place. Our common goal is to develop the Giveth platform, the team’s drive is defined as supporting transparency, open-source development, co-creation and collaboration.

We are moving towards a fully Decentralized governance system. We have been using our PoC DApp to compensate the team members’ efforts in a way that shows milestone achievements towards the common vision. We believe in the self-organizing power of holacracy, which we apply in the organization of tasks, our Slack channels and during our governance meetings, which you can check out here.

Unicorns Frolicking in Berlin

Let’s do this together.

Join us and show your belief in the Power of Decentralization, Altruism and Community.

As an Ethereum developer we invite you to contact us and discover more about our smart contracts: use them to implement your own governance model and help us bring them to the next level. As an aspiring DAC we invite you to talk to your developers and to us: let’s find out how we can collaborate!

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and join our Slack. Let us inspire each other and make a difference, let us be a true community of Unicorns.

Warm regards,

Giveth

*Giveth’s Smart Contracts have centralizing security features (Like escape hatches) that are necessary in 2017 while working with young smart contract tech, but all the centralizing security features have the ability to be turned off so the DAC can become truly decentralized — although we don’t recommend it at this stage.