Harmony Community DAO: A Call for Collaboration

5 min readJul 12, 2021

Why Is This Call Being Made?

The recent rollout of the Harmony DAOs has shown how pulling form from the formless can be chaotic and sometimes painful, but DAOs are critical for the decentralization of any protocol. Harmony acknowledges this, yet they are people at the core, and sustainable systems creation on a social level is an emerging field and the majority of people have no clue how it is implemented, applied, or designed. One small team cannot have an entire world’s answers. We (the initial council of the Community DAO) have seen what has been going on; we have seen the structure changes; we have seen the scramble and haste; all this aside, we still see an immense amount of possibility and opportunity.

First, we will elaborate on our mission as the Community DAO and our structure. Then, the researched principles used to design our structure will be used to set some recommendations for other Harmony DAOs and DAOs-to-be so interoperability and cohesiveness exist between the governing structures in our ecosystem. Finally, we will expand on our public forums and conferences in shaping our DAOs as they are rolled out over the next 3 months. All research will be made available in public files/links at the bottom of this article.

Community DAO Mission

The community DAO’s purpose is to serve as a social platform for transparent governance to create community initiatives that have the option of working with other areas, such as other DAOs and protocols, to develop greater projects. The mission of the Community DAO is to create a platform/toolkit to make collaboration, conversation, and creation more transparent, efficient, and secure when designing/implementing a community proposal. The role of the initial council, or any preliminary drafting body, is to assure a supportive framework is in place for the purpose and mission to be accomplished.

Community DAO: Structure

We focused on process creation, sustainment, and growth. This combined with minimum-viable-product ideology and sustainable design ideology is where we created a blueprint. The Community DAO is responsible for upholding the mission to its members, so we started with the first basic steps of what the community process would be: registering wallets, voting, exploring different DAOs, growing the ecosystem, and exploring more. The Sustainable systems are cyclical, meaning the process ends at a renewal point for the same process to begin again. There are a few ways to achieve this, but all relate to building value to propel the next cycle.

Community DAO: Process

The initial council of the Community DAO is exploring a combination user friendly system of registering wallets to an NFT ID domain which will connect to a KYC providing a verified badge. The ID’s would be affordable and the NFT domain would require renewal every year but the KYC would be kept the same as long as the domain does not change (all of which could be automated in the future). We want to make it really hard for anyone to obtain more than 1 active voting wallet. Through this renewal process a sustainable fund is generated for the Community DAO to manifest Community generated proposals and the system is made harder to manipulate/bot/game. The financial sustainment of the renewal process provides the energy to grow.

Community DAO: Sustainment

However, growth is only assured by the systems that grow it, not the resources that lay around it. Once a voting method and accountability assurance is established, a proposal system will be established using as many existing resources as possible. This process must include public communication lines between the various DAOs and outlets of the Harmony Community. Importantly, the process must be accommodating to iterative design to meet the changing needs. The initial council will create as much as possible in the agreed term length, and what cannot be finished will be left to the next council as recommendations and explanations of the pathway. Tutorials will be made on every available platform. These processes will be the seed that uses the energy available.

Community DAO: Growth

The future generations of councils will receive a self-sustaining system. With their careful creation and addition of another sustainable revenue source the community will be presented with the possibility to grow organically, unstrained by resources and revenue. The Community DAO, and any DAO, is a collaborative tool to organize around a common goal that supports the ecosystem it exists within; that is Harmony. The tools developed by the Community DAO will be made available for all other DAOs to use in our harmonious ecosystem. The wheel does not need to be continually reinvented; the rest of the vehicle needs to be designed too.

Harmony DAO Recommendations

As such, the recommendations for the other DAOs are as follows. First, communicate with other DAOs to find your niche and increase possible utility to the community. Next, create a process with a cyclical fashion in mind, rather than linear. Social cyclical design involves applying an iterative process and user/developer feedback loops. Third, use all existing resources when possible; this does not include the granted funds, but refers to the inner community capital that exists (i.e. social outlets, free online tools, crowdsourcing talent from the community, existing dApps, etc.). Most importantly, design a feasible and renewable funding source and be ready to be the ones to implement/prove it. Renewable funding is funding generated by process and not a one-time action. Finally, future-trip a little bit and lay a vision of where you see the DAO going and how you see it interacting with the ecosystem at hand. While this last bit may not be implemented by future councils, it provides alignment from most crash courses.

Community DAO: Community-Call Conference

The initial council of the Community DAO has 81 days left to complete a sustainable voting system for Community generated proposals/initiatives. The mandate is drafted and a rough starting process is in motion. However, to accomplish the purpose and mission, there is a need to come together to talk about the future. Interactive conferences will be created to invite various actors in the Harmony Community to come speak and for the Harmony Community at large to attend and engage. We will be using AirMeet to host a collaborative environment. There will be a main stage with speakers at the start (chat and on screen emojis will be enabled) and, following the main presentation, everyone will enter a virtual convention floor that hosts 1v1 conversations, and group-based conversations of up to 8 people (called “tables”). The speakers will sit at their own tables to allow community members to sit in small discussion groups with them, and everyone else is welcome to sit at their own table, another table, or go for the 1v1 random pairing section. Notes and recordings will be taken throughout the entire process. There is an attendance limit of 100 people, unless we pay for a larger package, but organizing over 100 people into constructive conversation Is at times inefficient. If there is a need/demand, we will create the way; that is our promise to you. The first meeting is TBA.

Thank you for your time,

Peace, Love, and Harmony

Edited and Sanctioned by the Community DAO Initial Council

Written by OG_Lemurman (Colin)

Links to Research Resources