Should Social.coop start a DAO?

I was just thinking that maybe we should talk about the Distributed Cooperative Organization (DisCO) as a possible model for Social.Coop, maybe even explore collaboration with the Guerrilla Media Collective...
Lots of questions: isn't Open Collective sufficient? Do we need another organization to moderate and do admin for? Wouldn't it be wiser to flesh out Social.Coop's community, tech, and financial infrastructure?

BUT I also think it would be great to explore DAO and DisCo -- if we stop exploring, we lose energy and focus.

I'm concerned about further atomizing the participation methods / governance mechanisms of social.coop ( http://social.coop ) (there are already other channels of participation that I am not aware of -- e.g. someone mentioned recently something about a Matic group?).

What would be the advantages, pros/cons of starting a DAO? Would the DAO replace one of our existing mechanisms?

What's Matic? Tried to google but couldn't find out.

We should maybe list all the different ways of participation in the landing page and perhaps in a pinned post in Loomio. New members might have difficulty finding our mattermost chat for example.

We used to have a Wiki for this but somehow it got destroyed :(.

I can see your point about atomising participation, think it can be a problem especially if there is an overlap of functions (such as if we would be having both Discord, Slack and Mattermost chat).

Would there be overlap between what we do with Loomio and what we would do with DAO @Nathan Schneider?

I know very little about DAO/blockchain/DISCO/holochain stuff and find it difficult to wrap my head around it so am agnostic on its possibilities. As a principle however I do think we should more actively seek to engage and support other platform coops.

What's Matic? Tried to google but couldn't find out.

I think that's meant to mean Matrix, see wiki link below for links to the 3 channels that were in action (I use the open tech one sometimes).

We used to have a Wiki for this but somehow it got destroyed :(.

https://wiki.social.coop is what you're referring to?

Ah right, there used to be MediaWiki based one too.

I meant to write "Matrix", not "Matic". Sorry, I think it got autocorrected weird.

It's unclear to me what this would get us over what we already have with loomio as a voting platform. I don't think we have the sorts of problems that a blockchain solves.

I have a predisposition against basically anything related to bitcoin, blockchain, ethereum, etc. But at the same time, I'm absolutely open to hearing about what we could gain from exploring new ideas and new platforms. Right now, I'm skeptical that we have much to gain, and I think we are rather low on resources to spend on that kind of exploration. We are making great steps in rebuilding the Tech WG right now but our capacity is limited, we have some pressing concerns, and there's already plenty of interesting things to pursue with a clearer benefit to the group once we have the basics more stabilized and up to date. The Community WG has been doing a great job, but opening up another separate platform for engagement sounds like a substantial increase to their workload. And from the perspective of a pretty highly engaged member, the idea of adding another parallel engagement platform with its own learning curve, is, frankly, exhausting to me.

I’m with @Matt Noyes on exploring the DisCO model. It’s not basically a tech model, or a platform (Guerilla Media have not yet implemented ‘the machine’ that may eventually form part of their way of working), it’s a sophisticated form of explicit agreement between trusting humans, about work, influence and mutuality. Fundamentally, work. The model does do accounting of contributions (of several kinds) thro OpenValue apps, but most of DisCo is about ethics and social relations among collaborators. I think social.coop really could do with such a frame - it’s so unclear who is doing what work, what the commitments in fact are - and there are so many casual participants who perhaps are not members of the coop in any real sense. However, DisCO is a model for an organisation that does paid work and provides livelihood, so I’m not sure that it could be forked for an organisation that does neither, where everything (including funding) is entirely voluntary, and where the services of a tech infrastructure are free for all comers - not as a commons among obligated contributors (which is what DisCO is about), but as a minimally regulated common pool. But it could be worth opening a discussion on this, some clarification would emerge, I think. @Stacco Troncoso might want to express a view of the social.coop use case?

I’m averse to the idea of a blockchain based frame. The trope of ‘autonomy’ in the fediverse spooks me, when it comes down to ‘trustless’ mechanisms and rule-based mediation by algorithms. Looking at the Dorg website I see a basically code-oriented world (links dropping straight into GitHub repos) with no sense that anybody there knows anything about people working with people. It appears that there’s a ‘get rich’ rationale at work down in the machinery somewhere, with an incentive mechanism akin to that of miners in bitcoin, and the ‘transparency’ that it offers to furnish seems to me founded in mistrust rather than nurturing the opposite. No, thanks.

Seems to me the valuable project in social.coop is how to associate, affiliate, mutualise and become visible to one another thro the web - a form of society founded in solidarity. I don’t get any sense Dorg/DAO is on that road. It seems DisCO is.

It's an odd question "Should Social.coop start a DAO?" without offering some compelling reasons why that would be a good thing!... Maybe a better question would be "is anyone here interested in collaborating...?" and then we could work out "what on?" and then, maybe, at some point we might need a better way to send messages to each other, to discuss things, to produce working docs, view shared calendars, and possibly even one day we might need to vote and decide on things together... Putting a highly complex technical cart (with no / little track record of providing a useful solution) before a social horse seems like the wrong idea to me... if that make sense!?
I'm willing to be proven wrong - but agree with Matt, and Open Collective probably does more than we would need - why even look at a DAO - and open ourselves up to all the potential problems that could bring? I'm with Noah on this.