Comments please on a proposed non-profit DAO structure

People, @burrrata, @Amazongirl,

One of the DAOs I want to setup is a non-profit organisation that would solicit crypto donations (I thought BTC to begin with) to run on-line conferences etc to achieve non-profit’s social goals. So far I have thought that:

  • BTC donations would be tagged in the OP_RETURN field with text reflecting the donor’s priority - I want this info permanently encoded for posterity and I thought having the info encoded on the largest and most recognised blockchain is the best idea.

  • An Aragon DAO would allow the donors to determine expenditure of the donations.

  • I would be able to veto any expenditure proposed by the members of the DAO to ensure that funds are only spent on achieving the goals of the DAO (in the long term I am thinking that this role would be taken over by an AI).

  • An on-line, distributed, publicly-accesible, complete record of all the accounting would be availble so that any new donors could be confident that all the donated funds are being spent in the appropriate way.

Feedback and constructive comment appreciated!

Regards,
Phil.

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@philiprhoades A Moloch DAO might serve your needs. I believe there will be an Aragon template available soon which enables you to create a Moloch-style DAO.

You can find out more about its characteristics here:

Moloch DAOs are more suitable for donors who want to be actively involved in how the DAO distributes funds via a grantmaking process. The donors are members of the DAO rather than merely passive donors.

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@Amazongirl ,

Excellent! - I will check that out . .

BTW, the reason I copied you in on this post was because of your comments on this very interesting post:

  • which I would like to get more involved with as my DAOs develop.

Many thanks!

Thanks for reaching out.

First, Aragon runs on Ethereum so you’d be able to receive and manage ETH donations, but not BTC.

Second, 1Hive’s Dandelion Orgs would be the easiest way to achieve the functionality you’re describing. It would allow you to pool funds into a DAO, then allow members to determine how those funds are spent. Everything would be transparently secured and verified on the Ethereum blockchain. If you wanted an additional layer of security you could plug the Aragon Court into the DAO to ensure that all finance transfers complied with the non-profit mission of the DAO. Happy to explain how that might work more in depth if it’s of interest.

Regarding DAO consultants, are you saying that you’d like to reach out to a consultant to get help designing, building, and deploying your DAO? Or that you’d like to become a DAO consultant yourself?

Right - so is there a way to include immutable text with the donation wrt to the donor’s preferred DAO target activity?

Thanks! - I will check that out too . .

Most definitely! I have been skimming the posts on the court so I have a general idea but an explanation of how it could help with my specific case would be much appreciated!

Both - in that order . .

I believe that you could do this in the data field of an Etheruem transaction. As far as I know, most people don’t decode the data fields when they receive Ethereum transactions. Might be easier to curate a list of DAOs that do awesome stuff and then just send transactions to those DAOs.

The Aragon Court will allow you to write a human readable contract that jurors can read, interpret, and enforce. For example, a contract might say “no voting on Tuesdays.” If a member of a DAO opens a vote on a Tuesday and it passes, members of the DAO could raise a dispute. Jurors would then look at the evidence and, if they determine that it is in fact Tuesday, they could block the vote from executing.

To apply this to your specific use case, you could have a contract that says that the DAO must use funds to provide clean water to refugees. If you can prove that the DAO created a vote to spend money on something else, for example a lavish party, then you could raise a dispute. Jurors could look at the evidence (perhaps the transaction is going from the DAO to a publicly known party supply store) and determine if the transaction should go through or not. This way, as long as someone is watching the organization and ready to raise disputes, you can ensure that the DAO will spend any funds it receives according to it’s goals.

For more information on how this might work please see 1. Encoding Organization Intent. There’s a helpful picture and everything :slight_smile:

Does that answer your question and/or do you have any other questions?

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Ah - so that data field would not be equivalent to the plain text 80 chars in a Bitcoin transaction - I would prefer a string of plain text preserved for posterity which is easily viewable . .

What I meant was that within the DAO that I create, each new member would include their preferred target for action in the form of a string that would be preserved in the transaction somehow.

That is sort of closing the gate after the horse has bolted . . I would prefer for me (or my AI Avatar) to have a veto over ALL spending . . so as long as spending is targetted at what is supposed to be targetted at, decisions are made in the normal way and are not vetoed. Of course creating a DAO where I have a veto power over spending might be a disincentive for some people to get involved . .

All that info helped - I have another idea now that is more innocuous than the main DAO that these questions have been about - to do with getting a group together to help subsidise Science Fiction writing by one or more AIs (but would work the same way as I am envisaging for the first DAO) so I might just start creating that and learn more by doing . . so what is my first step? - can I just create the DAO and evolve the rules as I go?

Also, I am thinking that remaining funds / tokens are not refundable ie they are donations to the cause for which the DAO was created (in my case Non Profit causes) . . and members can participate as little or as much as they like in the running of the DAO.

Thanks!