DAOstack With Kate Beecroft

A DAO is a network of stakeholders with no central governing body, just a set of rules encoded on a blockchain. We believe DAOs have the collaborative potential the world needs. The DAOstack project is building a modular, open-source software stack for DAOs that includes a library of governance protocols and friendly interfaces for creating and managing DAOs. DAOstack is an open source project advancing the technology and adoption of decentralised governance.To tackle today’s biggest problems, we need to coordinate around our shared values more effectively than our current systems allow. Blockchain makes a new type of organisation possible: the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

Kate Beecroft is the Ecosystem Lead at DAOstack. The company and platform grew substantially including the ICO in May 2018 creation of the GEN token, the launch of the first dApp Alchemy in 2018 and Alchemy Earth. In this podcast Kate discuses DAOstack and the future of decentralised technology.

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FOLLOW KATE BEECROFT, Ecosystem Lead at DAOstack

➡️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kbeecroft
➡️ Medium: https://medium.com/@katebeecroft

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Chapters

• 0:00 What is DAOstack?
• 1:12 Introducing Kate Beecroft
• 3:47 Private Versus Public
• 4:16 Control
• 5:24 In The Name Of Convenience
• 6:00 The True Power Of Decentralisation
• 6:52 The Benefits For People
• 7:02 The Bright Future Of Web 2.0
• 9:12 Community
• 9:26 Collective Intelligence
• 10:31 www.inaom.io

Transcript

Ina O'Murchu : 0:03

Hi and welcome to my podcast! I'm your host, Ina O' Murchu and in this podcast we hear about decentralised collaboration at scale and in it we speak with Kate Beecroft, who's head of the Ecosystem at DAOstack. Now what DAOstack is - It's an open source software stack designed to support a global collaborative network. The stack can be used to build organizations for any kind of collective work. It also contains tools to link these organizations together, so as the network grows, all its member organizations are strengthened. Organizations built on DAOstack belong in a new category structure called DAOs, Decentralised Autonomous Organizations. DAOs are organizations that run in peer to peer software backbones and empower groups of people to make non-hierarchical decisions about shared resources like funds for example. Those working on DAOstack believe that these structures have the potential to change the world, by making collaboration radically more accessible, direct and scalable. So without any further ado, we'll get stuck into the podcast and have a listen to what Kate had to say....

Kate Beecroft : 1:15

Hi, my name is Kate Beecroft. I fill many roles really right now. I'm the Head of Ecosystem at an amazing company called DAOstack, which is building DAOs on the decentralised Web. I also am the co-founder of a company called 'Greater Than' https://www.greaterthan.works/. We are consultants and specialists in the human side of decentralisation. We're really thinking about once these systems kind of come to fruition, the decentralised web and different ways to put people together and decisions and to make decisions on their own work and their own life. Really what is the human element that what we call the soft, soft governance, the off-chain protocols. 'Greater Than,' helps companies transition to what we call a self-managing way of working where people are. There is much less hierarchy, sometimes called bossless. So people are taking decisions for themselves. So we introduced them to many practices for that kind of work. Before that I was part of a global network of entrepreneurs called 'Enspiral' https://enspiral.com/. Started in New Zealand. And we have been prototyping and experimenting right on the very edge of what's possible and new ways of working for the last eight years. I mean, this is a really important question, what what does the future look like? Is it decentralised? The answer for all of us working in kind of what's known as Web 3.0 is let's hope so! Basically, there is a lot of the effort that goes into the kind of decentralised governance component of blockchain is really building the foundations for a decentralised future, because if we don't, we're really at risk of, you know, corporations, the big, the big four, as well as many others and states just having so much control and power over our everyday existence. Matan, the CEO, and founder of DAOstack and I was just having a conversation about this. We really see DAO's or decentralised autonomous organisations, as the future of how humans organise and coordinate and with much more autonomy and much more ability to do what's right for them to make decisions on their own lives. Outside of what we have currently been doing, and how we organise for the last 200 or so, years, it is mostly in corporations. Yeah, it's kind of like DAO's are collaborative networks that give true agency to people to govern themselves.

Ina O'Murchu : 3:47

Up against say, for example, a centralised version of crypto like Libra versus Bitcoin which is truly decentralised. Where as DAO's also, I mean, a lot of people this is two things. It's kind of like the the battle between corporate owned highway or public owned, you know, you're giving the governance to the whole model actually, of governance is for the way our society is. It's the same with money. It's kind of should be the other way around. It's kind of been inverted because of the control.

Kate Beecroft : 4:16

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for for a long time now, we've been operating with these two dominant structural systems as the only possibility, which is, you know, state based regulation, or, I suppose, centralized corporate control. And now that we have this, this technology that then does make another way possible. So yeah, I think like Libra, is a hugely interesting thing I suppose. That's really taken a lot of people by a bit of shock. I mean, we always knew something was coming. And perhaps on the one side, it's doing a lot of as a net positive game for the crypto community in the blockchain world because it's really raising the volume. And probably a lot of the headlines that we're seeing is related somewhat to this. Even if it's successful, this gives them just unprecedented ability to control all parts of the pipeline in the system. How do we want the future to look like and is a huge centralized player making it much more accessible for people to use cryptocurrency and the blockchain really in our best interests? I would say no.

Ina O'Murchu : 5:24

I think the challenge around this is more people don't care about actually how technology works. You know, just give me my hairdryer. I don't want to know how it was put together. I don't know. I don't even care how it was engineered. I just want it to work. And that is a lot of issue around with cryptocurrency. It's not user friendly, and it's good side of Libra. But I think it will take people the education takes time and people have to become that don't really understand what they're doing and they do it out of convenience that has the potential disaster or sort of like being kind of a little bit blind to what you're going into, all in the name of convenience.

Kate Beecroft : 6:00

100%. I think that's totally correct that the majority of people totally I don't know, really how a lot of things I use like the hairdryer or even the internet truly works at the many, many layers of complexity that are there. And the same with the blockchain, like we can't expect people that to interface with such a clunky system. And people are really wanting to use something that's easy. So this is the big challenge of our whole industry is to be aiming towards building those interfaces that let the user interact with the blockchain. And they don't even know that they are. So we're not there yet. And obviously, it is taking time, but we just can't take our focus off that goal, but hopefully the true, the true power of decentralisation, does enable a stronger force to actually emerge alongside the things like Libra.

Ina O'Murchu : 6:52

What will it change? What sort of a decentralised economy - one that's not owned by the corporates? What does it mean for the for the person on the street? You know, you mentioned a couple of things there but what's the benefit?

Kate Beecroft : 7:02

How I see it in much in a kind of a concrete or tangible way is that since the Internet or Web 2.0 dawned, there has been this, like, inherent latent possibility of what humans could do together when they're truly able to coordinate. Where, you know, borders and the kind of the constraints that we've had throughout the lifetime of humanity don't exist because we have this ability to create relationships and talk and plan and meet people with the common interest on the total opposite side of the world to us. So, you know, there's an amazing book called 'Here Comes Everybody' by an academic called Clay Shirky and he really outlines this in the height of like, energy that Web 2 came forth about with the emergence of social networks. Like half we've got this new economy where people can really produce and be compensated for what they produce, you know, form groups where they actually, they have a cause they they find the revenue to fund themselves to carry out the actions necessary to support that cause whatever it is. That kind of amazing potential was cut short, because, you know, we saw like the key platform movers, centralized platform movers take the ability of the true kind of prosumer. And like, take the margin into their own for their own needs, right, like YouTube, Facebook, all of those players. There is alignment there, but they're extracting the value for their own for their stakeholders was their shareholders under the current model. So this notion of like platform, corporatism, is really still a potential that I think can be realized by the decentralised, by a decentralised web and economy. And yeah, if we think of the social network as a collaborative network where people could actually find themselves make governance decisions over the Money, have an instant transfer of money to do that - then we can actually see a start that really tackles some of the big problems that currently. The systems that we have just prevent us.

Ina O'Murchu : 9:12

I even think I think the word comm-unity, it's coming together of a 'unity' of people, the way human beings naturally collaborate. It's we've been disallowed that by the technology by the current system of technology that we have.

Kate Beecroft : 9:26

Absolutely. And I think the key thing is that communities a great for me, a community is like Dunbar's number, which is 150. I mean, maybe a sociologist would disagree with me. But where it starts to get really interesting is when community and community join and there's like this whole kind of mesh or network of communities and that becomes a network and a collaborative power of networks is very strong. And that's what really what I think we're trying is to build towards and we have with DAOs is the notion of an organisational form, which is a network and the definition of a network or an open network or collaborative network is that anyone can come and plug and play as long as the, the principles and the guidelines to do that are clear. And that's what happens in a DAO. It's a it's a kind of a unstoppable mound between a social network and a corporation where anyone can come and stop and play and like, kind of as long as they're sticking to the principles and the the protocol which is imposed by the social contract.

Ina O'Murchu : 10:31

Thanks for listening and checking out my podcast. You can head over to Spotify and find my podcasts there or on Apple iTunes, subscribe to my podcast on my website, you can head over to my website http://www.inaom.io for further details.