How to buidl a movement: What the Swedish Pirate Party teaches us about scaling DAOs Seth Goldfarb Follow Mar 9 · 13 min read

“In 2006, about 1.2 million citizens — voters — in Sweden were sharing culture and knowledge in violation of the copyright monopoly and didn’t see anything wrong with that, but were still being actively demonized by the establishment. To get into Parliament, you need 225,000 votes. This meant that if just one-fourth of the people thus demonized were angry enough about it and didn’t take that kind of treatment sitting down, then the Pirate Party would be in Parliament. That was our goal, posted on the very first day on the website: 225,000 votes.”

Person 1: Hey team, I’m Person 1 and I just heard about your project and love the vision! I’m an experienced [insert profession here] and wondering how to contribute?

Team member: Hey Person 1, thanks for joining the group! We’re happy to have you here and really value your input but we’re not looking for help with that. Thanks though!!!

Sound familiar?

Far too often, promising projects and organizations limit their ability to scale by failing to develop effective strategies for leveraging community support.

Failure to engage and leverage support from early adopters can tarnish a project’s reputation for effective resource management and ultimately prevent the project from receiving the feedback it needs to develop into a useful product.

UX is often described as one of the major hurdles to “mass adoption” when it comes to dApps and one area of interest that hasn’t received a lot of attention lies at the intersection of governance and scalability.

The Social Aspects of Scaling

The purpose of this document is to develop a framework for addressing the social aspects of scaling DAOs and other decentralized initiatives.

This framework borrows heavily the governance principles outlined in Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual to Changing The World. Written by Rick Falkvinge, Founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, the document explains how to build a swarm organization,

“…a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside…built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.”

The Swedish Pirate Party organized to reform Sweden’s copyright and patent laws and promote government transparency and citizens’ rights to privacy.

To address the issues of governance associated with scaling a movement, the framework described in this document will describe how to gather and organize a swarm. It will provide insight into how to:

Broadcast a compelling message Buidl and sclae leadership Providing ongoing opportunities for community input

To be clear, this is not about how to buidl a community. It could be applied when buidling a community around a product but in contrast to a movement, members of a community don’t necessarily share a common goal other than their general well-being.

Ideally, a movement should form to address a problem or accomplish a certain task and then disband and move on to better things once the problem has been dealt with or the goal has been accomplished.

When buidling a movement, the first objective we need to accomplish is building a critical mass of energy around the mission of the movement and to do that, we need to tell a good story.

Broadcasting a compelling message

In his TED Talk, Derek Sivers uses a viral Youtube video of people informally organizing a group dance at a music festival to describe the process of self-organization.

The video opens with a shot of an individual dancing wildly in a grassy field. A few people take notice but not much else occurs. Then, a second individual joins the first and something changes. The individuals who previously took notice and moved on start to join the two in their dancing and suddenly more and more people pile in once they realize everyone else wants to.

As Sivers explains, the individual that had the biggest impact on the formation of the group wasn’t the first person dancing alone; the second individual made the biggest impact by joining the first person and, in the eyes of the crowd, giving them legitimacy.

We, the audience, have no idea whether or not the first person knew the second or if the second person was a total stranger and in terms of the movement, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the first person did something compelling, the second responded, and the crowd joined in.

“the Pirate Party has its website up”

The Swedish Pirate Party launched with a simple website and two lines of introduction posted on a file-sharing hub called “Ancient Spirit” on January 1, 2006:

“Hey, look, the Pirate Party has its website up after New Year’s. http://www.piratpartiet.se/”

http://www.piratpartiet.se/ has come a long way since 2006 (2020)

By the following afternoon, Falkvinge had received a call from a reporter with the Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s largest newspapers, who published an interview that evening along with a poll showing that sixty-one percent of respondents would vote for the new Pirate Party.

Launching a movement requires “Timing, social context, and message…focus in the swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.”

“You need to identify the group of people affected in a positive direction by your provocative idea, estimate the size of that group, and then make an educated guesstimate as to what portion of this group may engage in the swarm at the lowest level of activation.”

How to explain the mission

To get people working at that lowest level of activation, a movement needs to tell a good story.

A helpful exercise when crafting the story is to ask “why does this matter?” and continue asking the question until the group has honed in on the deepest values it wants to embody. Generally speaking, people don’t respond to what you do but why you’re doing it.

If you can’t imagine your movement gaining the critical mass necessary to achieve the goal of those working at the lowest level of activation, refine your mission and the story behind it until you can. If you don’t believe your story, why should anyone else?

“Mention your idea and plan in a couple of places where your intended activists would typically hang out. That’s enough. If it’s good, people will pick it up and talk to their friends in turn. …If your idea is good and people can contribute, change the world, and see how it can be done, then you will have the first wave of hundreds of volunteers in less than a day.”

A word on failure

Failure happens. A lot.

Whether we consider the statistics claiming that 70% to 90% of startups are doomed to failure or the pareto principle stating that in many situations, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, history often reminds us to be prepared for failure.

There’s a saying that goes: “ luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” and while preparation is certainly important, it’s equally important to consider that it may take numerous iterations over lengthy amounts of time before a good opportunity presents itself.

When trying to launch a movement, founders should interact with their desired audience and be prepared to iterate on their message to attract the critical mass of attention necessary to launch a movement.

We can point to as many interesting trends as we like to with regard to popularity and adoption but at the end of the day, the truth of the matter is that what makes something go viral generally boils down to good luck.

Buidling and sclaing leadership

Once a movement has reached a critical mass of energy, the next objective for the team will be to provide a structure that allows supporters to meaningfully engage with the project and help bring its vision to life.

What the “lowest level of activation” entails will be different for different movements. For the Swedish Pirate Party, the lowest level of activation meant collecting signatures:

“…in order to make this organization set and settle, there needs to be something to be done right away. In the case of the Swedish Pirate Party, that task was to collect two thousand signatures from the public to support the party’s registration with the Election Authority.”

For the Swedish Pirate Party, it made sense to coordinate geographically and split groups up as they became too large. Online movements may coordinate around different functions like fundraising, marketing, and development — it just depends on what works best for the swarm.

Providing structure for the swarm

To organize these structures effectively, we can look at insights into how people tend to interact with each other in different-sized groups and the way those groups tend to form.

“Initially, you will be able to coordinate at most thirty groups, so create a discussion forum with at most that number of subgroups. …Try to pick your geographical division so that the typical size is about seven members and no subgroup has more than thirty members.

Seven, thirty, and 150 have become recognized as general benchmarks for understanding social complexity at different scales.

“In a group of three people, there are three relationships (A to B, B to C, and A to C). …if we up the group size to the critical seven people, there are twenty-one relationships between people that the group needs to maintain in order to function as a working group.”

As the swarm grows, existing leaders will need to continue organizing groups into appropriate sizes and onboard new leaders to manage those groups.

‘Dunbar’s number’ refers to the maximum number of relationships a person can comfortably sustain, which happens to be roughly 150. When the swarm nears 150 members, the core leaders should find a way to begin organizing members into smaller groups of thirty.

Each team of thirty-ish should have its own leadership team of no more than seven members and teams should aim for roughly thirty-ish members at the most.

As subgroups start to form, founders should reach out to introduce themselves to new leaders and “set up a subforum where these subgroup leaders can discuss things between themselves and with you.”

“Having set the initial structure, you need to tell everybody to go to the appropriate subgroup…Tell people to introduce themselves to one another, and to select a leader between them for the subgroup. At this point, you can safely refrain from giving instructions as to how that leader should be selected; the subgroups will come up with different ways that each have legitimacy in their respective group, and that’s all that matters at this point.”

How to empower leaders

“If you want leadership in a swarm, you stand up and say, “I’m going to do X, because I think it will accomplish Y. Anybody who wants to join me in doing X is more than welcome.” …This quickly creates an informal but tremendously strong leadership structure where people seek out roles that maximize their impact in furthering the swarm’s goals.”

In the same way that forking a blockchain or “ragequitting” allows people to continue working toward similar goals on their own terms, supporting multiple subgroups enables leaders with different values and tactics to support the mission on their own terms.

As they say, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” so it can be easy for inexperienced leaders to want to micromanage the movement but building momentum means learning how to attract and empower leaders capable of moving things forward.

Leaders should absolutely communicate but don’t necessarily need to be in constant communication to get things done.

The founders of a movement share a unique responsibility to remain flexible toward the strategies and tactics of different subgroups and focused on facilitating meaningful engagement among supporters while promoting leaders as they step up.

Dealing with downers

Every movement will deal with internal conflict at one point or another. When a movement starts gaining steam, it won’t be uncommon for individuals to try and use the movement as an excuse to stroke their ego.

I’m reminded of a particular individual I became aware of through a group of acquaintances involved in the Occupy movement who spent weeks instigating arguments and incessantly posting misinformation in group chats after minor disagreements with their subgroup.

Having a different opinion didn’t make this person a troublemaker. They could have joined a different subgroup or tried to gather enough support to form their own but instead, that person put their interest above that of the group and the group simply moved on.

“the transparency of the swarm is the best conceivable antidote, as such people typically depend on other people not comparing the different versions of the story they’re being told.”

Providing opportunities for input

To gather steam, the leaders of a movement need to provide clear ways for supporters to help the movement achieve its mission.

“as you build a swarm, it is imperative that everybody is empowered to act in the swarm just on the basis of what he or she believes will further its goals — but no one is allowed to empower himself or herself to restrict others, neither on his or her own nor through superior numbers.”

Culture, structure, and leadership are the three elements to consider when creating opportunities for supporters to engage with the movement.

Culture

Things like foundational documents, slogans, memes, theme songs, and t-shirts all contribute to the culture of an organization and culture matters because it shapes the movement’s identity and encourages people to be loyal to each other and the cause.

Organizing a workshop or series of events to nail down the movement’s foundational documents and plan its first actions can be a great way to engage co-founders and allow them to get familiar with each other.

Structure

Beyond managing the size of subgroups within the movement, providing structure means empowering leaders and being ready to respond with tasks that need completing when an eager supporter asks, “what can I do to help?”

For smaller organizations, have a list of specific tasks and leadership roles with outlined commitments ready. Larger organizations should direct new supporters to the appropriate subgroup(s) and allow subgroup leaders to facilitate participation.

Rather than excluding individuals who may lack leadership experience or experienced leaders who may be unfamiliar with the movement, learn what makes existing leaders effective and collaborate to develop onboarding procedures to bring new leaders into the fold.

Leadership

Effective leadership means embracing the paradox that good leaders must give power in order to get it. The most important things a leader needs to do are embody the values of a movement and take care of their people.

Practically, this means actively participating in decision-making processes and making sure that group members have the resources they need to work effectively. Sometimes “resources” means money and sometimes it means snacks and craft supplies.

“Here’s where the famous “three-pirate rule” comes into play: if three self-identified pirates are in agreement that some kind of activism is beneficial to the party, they have authority to act in the party’s name. They can even be reimbursed for expenses related to such activism, as long as it is reasonable (wood sticks, glue, and paint are reasonable; computer equipment and jumbotrons are not).”

What this means for DAOs

In theory, a DAO can be used to coordinate whatever a group of people can imagine but one of the biggest obstacles to the development of more effective DAOs has been

Most of the DAOs we see today tend to provide one of two functions: funding or governance. “Funding DAOs” coordinate the distribution of grants or investments while “governance DAOs facilitate voting on different aspects of a project’s governance.

MolochDAO, which provides Ethereum development grants, would be an example of a “funding DAO” while MakerDAO would be a “governance DAO” because it enables Maker token (MKR) holders to vote on changes to the protocol governing the DAI stablecoin.

To understand what all of this means in the context of scaling DAOs, we need to draw some lines between movements and other forms of organization. Then, we can think about how the Pirate Party’s insights can apply to different types of DAOs.

Movements vs Businesses

The difference between movements and businesses boils down to their motivation: if it’s mission-driven, it’s a movement. If it’s profit-driven, it’s a business.

A movement may form businesses or non-profit organizations to support itself but what those organizations are able to accomplish depends on their funding and revenue — even nonprofits need customers in the form of donors to keep their activity going.

Using this framework, I would describe networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum as movements because they represent ecosystems of miners, developers, buidlers, etc. with the mission of providing a web-of-trust for individuals with competing interests.

Businesses, on the other hand, rely on employees and contractors who expect the business to support their livelihood. Who gets things done and the amount of funding (or revenue, at least) matter more to the success of a business than that of a movement.

What a DAO might be

Regardless of their purpose, seven, thirty, and 150 can be used as benchmarks for structuring organizations. When it comes to how members can exercise power within an organization, however, the purpose of an organization should help determine its structure.

DAOs are often envisioned as supporting holacracy or “flat organizations” but the challenges demonstrated by the Ethereum community’s experiments in holacracy (ConsenSys, various DAOs) show us how structure, or the lack thereof, can affect an organization’s ability to perform.

Flexible power structures support movements because movements are (or should be) more about what gets done than who gets them done or how much money the organization can get.

Businesses, on the other hand, need more structure to hold people accountable to their work and ensure that money keeps flowing.

In conclusion

“…three years after launch, in 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European elections, securing its first seats.”

The success of the Swedish Pirate Party shows that creating more powerful DAOs means more than improving the UX of onboarding and interfaces. Buidling the DAOs of the future means incorporating the basic principles of human organization into the power dynamics of DAOs.

The DAOs of the future will need support for the ongoing creation of subgroups with their own customizable rules, friendlier interfaces that allow collaborators to develop the culture of their movement, and templates for buidling and sclaing different types of organizations.

In many ways, the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) we see today can be considered attempts at rebuidling the startup with a “remote-first” mentality.

If DAOs are to do for businesses what the Pirate Party did for the citizens of Sweden, we have to figure out how to tackle governance in a sclaable manner.