What makes a DAO actually decentralised: Swarthyhatter.
Part of a working session on building the We Them Media DAO, and the clearest explanation on the channel of what the word is supposed to mean. The worked example is a logo competition: an open call, then the six favourites each go up as a proposal people vote on with their tokens.
Why that is better than picking one: “the process of doing this is what builds your community,” because “participating in the decision makes them actually a member of the community. That’s what brings them back.”
Then the part with teeth. Most projects, he says, “parade around the fact that they’re in a DAO, they ask people to send them logos, and then this little body of people just pick what they like. And then they put that out there and they represent that as decentralized community governance. It’s totally” not. What it actually is: “centralized intermediaries making choices without any enforceability from the broader participants.” Do it the other way and “you can credibly call yourself a decentralized community. Maybe not autonomous, but definitely credibly decentralized.” And the difference between the two words is enforceability: “what makes you autonomous is whenever every part of your organization is enforceable. It doesn’t rely on you or informal agreements, but there’s mechanisms to enforce it.”
The last minute is about who gets to decide. The people who staked in, did the work or contributed the intellectual property hold the authority; the users and the wider public get to “weigh into the process. Not authoritatively, but nonetheless.” He calls that governance signal rather than consensus, and says it is how you defuse “the founder community tug of war that people are always trying to play.” Language is unfiltered. The transcript below is from the original audio.