Sustainability & The Harmony Community DAO

Colin Ricketts
4 min readJun 28, 2021

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The Harmony Community DAO is a system of governance for the community to support and grow itself through filling the needs directly experienced. The importance of the Community DAO’s purpose cannot be stressed enough, yet equally important is the system design in which it is accomplished. This system must be efficient, credible, stable, and open to the whole community. Through the usage of sustainable design theory, it is possible to create a resilient and wholesomely representative system that can grow and promote growth within itself.

The core pillars of sustainable design revolve around a sacred balance and interconnected relationship between the environment, ethics, and economics in which we carry ourselves and provide for future generations. Applying these core principles leads to the creation of better bearable, equitable, and viable systems. Sustainable systems are cyclical in operation and self-sustaining thus able to generate growth from within. This is accomplished through collaborative diversity, thoughtful planning, careful consideration of resources, clear milestones and metrics, and usage of feedback loops.

“Smart government supports citizen-centricity, innovation, knowledge, sustainability” (Gil-Garcia, Zhang and Puron-Cid, 2016). Smart governance supports community-centricity, innovation, knowledge, and sustainability. We are beginning to reach the cross-roads of decentralized governance and centralized government needing to come to an agreement and understanding, so it is important to create a system that is secure, trusted, and transparent to make this coming-together easier. The Harmony Community DAO Governance needs to not only guarantee the prior mentioned, but also build long term value for the community it represents. Through building value the community can be sustained and grown.

“A multi-stakeholder perspective emerges as needed to drive sustainability in the value co-creation process. This can be mirrored in the extant literature dealing with service ecosystems, though the involvement of actors [Community] should lead firms [DAO & Council] to consider their support from the conception of new ideas to their implementation, and then to communication, as this latter action would favor a higher awareness of what to do to attain sustainability and to forward institutions as being supportive of the viability of a service ecosystem.” (Brozovic et. All, 2020) The Community DAO should provide empowerment to the community to come together and should also hold the Council to solely represent the community, their interests, and their financial capabilities/responsibilities. Transparency and communication built on a clear and open level must be applied to council conduct.

“Engagement, interaction, self-service, and user experience are considered the critical factors in value co-creation.” (Bendapudi et. All, 2021) The responsibility of the operating agreement drafted by the initial council for the Community DAO should establish a framework to assure the persistent councils promote these factors through efficient means. For example, to recognize “the importance of diversified experiences of co-creation, and more diversified tasks should be designed to encourage more [members] to participate and thereby improve their attitude toward engaging in such activities.” (Chen, 2020) Through recognition and application of diversity the Harmony Community DAO could present a fertile ground for sustainable collaboration and growth of the community it represents. The effective drafting of the initial operating agreement is the seed to grow into this sustainable form.

“Value co-creation requires collective visioning and behavioural change in order to transform social actors from passive consumers to active value co-creators towards sustainability and therefore involves extensive and deliberate social learning, and relationship and resource reconfigurations” (Farla et al. 2012). Providing a pathway for the persistent councils to conduct themselves will alleviate their stress and better prepare them to create opportunities, connect with the community, and provide empowerment/education. It is imperative that as much planning as possible go into the pre-work.

This pre-work includes not only the future voting of council members, but also how they will conduct themselves upon arrival. “Specifically[,] on DAOs in the evolve stage, “we need rules to change the rules”” (Choi et al., 2019) This discussion needs to happen, and needs to happen publicly. It is the initial council responsibility to engage the community to determine the consensus on how this should be achieved. The only way to achieve the above mentioned is through open and communicative feedback loops that apply what is said. This happens by listening, contributing, and collaborating as a collective.

While the roles of the initial council for the Harmony Community DAO are limited, they are still invaluably important. It creates a framework for generations of council members to either grow from or climb out of. Sustainable design theory can assure the time underground is close to nothing and that the seed of community collaboration can grow into a fruit bearing tree, able to produce its own seeds.

My name is Colin (AKA: OG_Lemurman); I am a Sustainable Environmental Design major; I am a current candidate of the Harmony Community DAO Initial Council Vote.

Thank you for your time.

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Colin Ricketts

Sustainable Environmental Design. Cyclical Sustainable System Assessment and Solutions.