The Space Collective is an idea I've been thinking about for a while and plan to write about more. I imagine it as a welcome place where people who are interested in space, but may not want to make a career out of it by becoming an engineer, scientist, or astronaut. A space place for the rest of us.
Before diving into the idea itself, though, there are a few background ideas that are needed to imagine how a Space Collective might work. This posting explores the idea of DAOs.
Like many similar articles, we answer the question, "Why a DAO?" Which for many prompts the further question, "What is a DAO?" This article, unlike many others around the interwebs, will approach the answer from the perspective of a Space Collective.
Organization
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization and is created by a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum.
The place to start in unpacking DAOs is "organization". When we think of a company, we imagine something that brings together (centralizes) resources (money, people, etc.) to organize. The best companies organize solutions to problems and then offer those solutions to customers as products or services. Companies have a hierarchy with one or few people at the top and lots of people working at the bottom. A space collective would bring together people, but having a strict hierarchy is probably unnecessary.
We can also envision other forms of organization, though, like a community garden, a condo or homeowner's association, an artist collective or a purchasing coop. These organizations are "flatter", in the sense that they have fewer layers to the hierarchy. One thing these organizations need is trust in order to function, and in-person human relationships are often the basis for that trust. A space collective would be much closer to this flat organization, but being online in-person relationships might be impossible.
Decentralized
When creating an internet organization, such centralized control is usually difficult because people are spread out (i.e. "decentralized") compared to the organizations mentioned above. Because each person in the space collective could be in a different country, in-person meetings would be expensive and rare, so we need a new basis for trust.
One way to coordinate decentralized organizations is to use a governance structure like Holocracy or Sociocracy (SFA flavour and S3 flavour). Holocracy focuses on businesses and Sociocracy is regularly used for collective action in both the commercial and not-for-profit worlds. This kind of human governance is flexible, allows serendipitous activity and emergent value — beneficial features for the space collective.
Autonomous
Another governance approach is setting up rules and creating software that enforces the rules automatically. This is the "autonomous" part of DAOs. The primary software rule of DAOs is: do what people propose and accept. So, one of the most important activities of DAO members is making proposals and voting. When the members accept a proposal, the software of the smart contract takes over and makes the change. Taking humans out of the loop often means things happen quickly and consistently, without fear or favouritism.
Without getting too far into the weeds yet, the space collective benefits from proposals, voting, and automation in three ways.
- Membership - members control who gets into the collective.
- Funding - members vote on receiving new funds and dispersing funds before the software takes action.
- GuildKick and RageKick - When removing members, members must consent.
Keeping Humans in the Loop
The last word in the previous sentence is important; DAO voting is closer to consent than consensus. Consensus means that most people must agree — difficult to achieve. Consent in Sociocracy is the combination of two ideas: good enough for now and safe to try. Consent is much easier to achieve than consensus because a member can consent, even if they disagree, if they cannot see harm, or a better way to move forward at the present.
Sometimes the only way to get new ideas is to try implementing a bad idea and see all the unintended consequences! Since a space collective is a new idea, moving forward may be very important, but not without some risk. Human consent provides a flexible layer on top of automation, an attempt at "best of all worlds".
Thanks for reading! That's all for now. In a future post, I'll discuss why DAOs are better than other forms of online organization, some important aspects of DAOs, interesting ways people implement DAOs, and finally, some options and use cases to consider.
Photo by White.Rainforest ∙ 易雨白林. on Unsplash