Okay. Nick, would you mind to start sharing? Thanks.

Cool. Okay. So thanks, everybody. We are happy to be here and, like, share a bit more of this record that we just published on, yeah, dollars and labor or like more generally working conditions within web three. So the core assumption for us going into project that has guided also a lot of, other Internet engagement, with the DAOs and protocols over the last few years is that contrary to the grand narrative of, unstoppable, unmanned organizations. These technologies do not run themselves. It is, people, obviously, that build and maintain these technologies. And that taking care of these people is key for the legitimacy of the space and also as a way for ensure the longevity of the ecosystem. So several surveys have been conducted to understand the contributor experience, but we found that these don't provide enough granularity to develop actionable insights. And so this is the reason why we, actionable insights. And so this is the reason why we ultimately developed this this study. So now going a bit into the project overview, the our study was structured into three phases. The first phase was an extensive literature review on the house and labor, which included not only industry analysis, but also academic literature in organizational studies and management, and also examples from historical analogs analogs of workers organizing. Secondly, we did the, an in-depth ethnography, which is what we'll be discussing here today. And last but not least, at the July, we ran a forum with the experts and aligned organisations to discuss the insights from the ethnography and facilitate a group learning to create actionable outputs. And this is what we're currently working on, and it will be the last publication for this, you know, as part of this research project. So, in terms of research questions, we, we had three key questions that guided our thinking. Firstly, we wanted to probe into the present and future of work through DAOs. We wanted to understand the affordances of different institutional logics that are implicit in the different metaphors that are used to describe DAOs, whether companies or co ops or now states and so on. And lastly, we wanna understand what job security means in the DAO context as it models itself around these existing forms, but also what is novel about this. And now I'll pass it to Tara to give us tell us a bit more about the demographics and the first insights to answer these questions.

Yeah. So as Laura mentioned, kind of what we did is try to go beyond this survey approach. We conducted twenty one one hour long interviews with various DAO contributors that have all sorts of different roles across the ecosystem. We also conducted a three hour IRL workshop during Chinwags, which was an event in Poland a few months ago with 17 contributors. And overall, we had representation from over 50 DAOs across the Ethereum ecosystem. Maybe interesting to the researchers here, we selected our sample from for the interviews from respondents to an online an open online call, supplemented some of this with people that we knew from our personal network, and kind of privileging full time DAO contributors with a diversity of experience. We tried to make sure that we had global representation. We're proud to say, you know, we we had people calling in from Asia Pacific, the African Continent, and all sorts of other places. Nevertheless, our our interviews and representation was a little skewed towards Europe and and The US nonetheless. In terms of DAOs, we try to have a healthy mix of DAOs that focus on providing services, DAOs that are focused on infrastructure and social DAOs, so those organisations mostly present for the vibe with or without a business model. And then last but not least, in terms of demographic sort of understanding, we also looked at the employment status of the contributors that we spoke to, and we found that the majority of people that we spoke to were working as freelance contractors, although we also had volunteers, we had full time employees with formal contracts, we had people without any formal engagement structure, and so on and so forth. And again, just to reiterate, we try to look predominantly for people who have been in this ecosystem for over two years and working in it full time and actually have some people who have been around Web3 and contributing regularly for over five years. So as Laura said in the beginning, what we also try to make sense of because not contributor and DAO are both two terms that collapse a lot within them, and we try to make that a bit of, like, the the nuance around these terms a little bit more visible. So we asked people to relate on a scale from one to five how much in their role they identified as other sort of institutional roles that that we found across our literature review that came up when people spoke about DAOs and DAO contributors. On the first level, the individual level, we we asked them, are you a learner? You know, are you a citizen? Are you an employee? Are you a volunteer, an intern, a fan? What is it? And here, we we've found that actually most people identified as as learners, but also as freelancers and open source contributors. We found that any sort of role emphasizing intrinsic motivation, so also volunteer or fan, they were more privileged than those like a gig worker or an employee, emphasizing more extrinsic motivation. And then maybe something that we kept on discussing throughout our research was the civic turn in DAOs and Web three coming a lot from this network state sort of narrative. But the role of a politician was surprisingly lower rated as compared to other things. And, yeah, here, this image just shows maybe the diversity of shapes that the role of a DAO contributor can take in the account of various individuals across the ecosystem. We did the same thing, and yeah, the graphs are quite small. It's more about showcasing the point of there is a diversity of shapes that we see when we talk about this one role that is the DAO contributor. It's not just one, it's many. The same thing is what we did with the the organizational level. So what is a DAO? Again, it collapses a lot of things. Again, we ask people to rate rate from one to five to what extent they understood their organization to to be you know, touch upon other organizational logics that we see in the space. We saw here that the idea of a mutualist org or a service provider ranked highest. The idea of DAOs being startups, companies, or educational institutions were also relatively highly ranked across contributors. However, once more, the the whole civic turn of DAOs as states or civic organizations more generally was not something that contributors found very much. So maybe this high level analysis, as well as the demographic, is more of, like, background knowledge of how we understand, this research subject that we began engaging with and something to keep in mind as we dive deeper into the two other things that we wanna explore is, number one, security that I will talk about a little bit more, and the question of how to increase security across the journey of contributors in different organizational contexts. So what does security mean for DAO contributors? We found, and again, resources from the literature, but also then sort of, like, complimented it with with some of the things that we heard from the people we spoke to, is that security is really a complex and multifaceted sort of thing. Predominantly, what we heard more security would mean is associated with psychosocial stability, with the idea of financial predictability and stability, but also with regulatory clarity, which is obviously something that's very much amiss within the Web3 ecosystem and being a DAO contributor overall when compared to traditional freelancing, for example. The idea of enhancing security and something that we also heard from our contributors, if we go to the next slide, there is a quote that makes it quite clear, is we don't just wanna, you know, enhance security overall, but this is really about, number one, doing something for the longevity of this ecosystem. As Laura said, this technology does not run itself. We need to attract and retain and build, you know, good, equitable, livable working conditions for the people who build and maintain this this tech stack. And the other thing here is a contributor saying, it looks to the outside like Web three is this very extractive, exploitative system when really it's about showcasing that, no, we are interested in some of the policy objectives that exist out there as well and, and, yeah, using more social security building mechanisms as a way to also enhance the legitimacy of Web three overall to the outside world. I'm gonna pass back to Laura now to walk us through what we saw the contributor journey evolve as.

Thanks. So, we wanted to look into, as I was saying at the beginning, the present and the futures of work through DAOs. And in order to answer this question or like investigate this field, we structured our interviews around the three key sections. Motivations, mundane, that is the day to day life of contributors, which is one of the core tenets of workers' inquiry as a specific method for knowledge production and organizing that takes the perspective of the workers as the primary source through which to investigate relations between labor, capital, and power. So and also we ask the contributors about their needs and aspirations for the future. So the key insights from the ethnography is that DAOs, as I was saying, do not represent a single future of work, but instead offer a container for diversity of organizational forms. And maybe if we go back to the previous slide, sorry, this was a quote from one of our interviewees that says that maybe this is one of the reason why this this environment seems so, you know, crazy or so confusing to pass and try and understand is that its entire direction is ultimately directly related to individual contributors, goals, and desires, the same goals. So and this is again why taking seriously the contributor's perspective can help us get a better sense of the overall landscape of DAO as a work environment. So the interviews and focus group basically surfaced archetypical DAO contributor journey across four different socio technical scenarios for DAO work, which vary according to their organizational purpose on the vertical axis. So emphasizing the for profit versus the pro social, goals and people's temporal horizon of engagement on the horizontal axis. So on the left side, the, you know, short term of first encounter with those, and then moving on the right side, a more long term sustained engagement. So these four scenarios also correspond to different organizational logics. Starting from the bottom left, the journey typically starts, with a desire for collaboration as the key motivating factor, which reflects, dynamics in fandoms and educational organizations. It then moves, or like in parallel, another scenario that gets a lot of people interested in The States for the first time is DAO as impact machine. So DAO as special purpose organizations that use business logic to generate impact and systemic change. Then as engagement becomes more durational, the scenarios also become more complex. Freelancing three point zero reflects the pleasures and pains of working as a remote contractor for companies and startups, but with the additional burden of lack of clear guidelines for compliance. And then lastly, DAOs as a mutual infrastructure, which in the eyes of the contributor is still one of the core aspirations for staying involved in the space as it includes and also improves on aspects of the other scenarios. So these scenarios correspond also to specific contributors, expectations, and challenges, and addressing them at each step of the journey is important to move people, again, along the journey and retain talent and make with free, valuable and legitimate alternative to traditional work cultures. So I'm gonna quickly go through each of these scenarios, emphasizing, like, the tension. So they were identified, and then you can find a more detailed breakdown in our report, which we can share in the chat. So starting with Dallas as an excuse for collaboration, we found that, you know, web three is often portrayed as a field where people are in for the tech. But instead we found that actually building meaningful relationships, working alongside smart people and exploring individual interests in collaborative environments are still some core motivating factors across all the contributors we talk to. On the other hand, this is where contributors face challenges at the level of inadequate and sometimes in practical technical structures, and sometimes too informal and opaque political structure and hierarchies. And this is one of the key reasons why people tend to lose interest or drop out early. As one contributor observer here, collaboration and networks can outlive an organisation itself. So in that sense, you know, if you can see their DAOs or Web three as the difference we made along the way, then perhaps the system can be sustainable. But, again, moving into other scenarios, we see that perhaps things are a bit different. For instance, moving on to Dow's impact machines. Here, one of the myth is that Dow's are maintained by nihilistic regions. But actually, as we find in the next slides, a lot of people join because of the desire to generate impact and systemic change and see DAOs as a means to achieve that. But here we also found that over half of the people we talk to see attention between their individual sense of purpose and the unclear and often opaque sense of purpose of their organizations, which have led some to become disillusioned. And, here we see a quote by, again, one of our contributors that we talked to who said that the rhetoric of DAOs as is, you know, mutual, like, collaborative organizations, is often in conflict with the reality of the business model that a lot of these organizations have to, you know, like, confront or deal with them. Then moving on to DAOs as freelancing, this is where we found the most tensions because this is also the quadrant that reflects the situation that most of the interviewees are leaving. So the first tension was around the individual brand versus collective action. So again, contrary to a narrative of DAOs as the new structure for collective action, the majority of interviewees, those that had been working in DAOs for longer, till now they face the same challenges of freelancers with the added burner of burden of regulatory compliance. One interview even compared our work to sex work for the, again, the regulatory challenges that both of these categories of workers are facing. So what happens here is that our work becomes highly individualized and more precarious than traditional freelancing, so that it becomes challenging to navigate the boundaries between individual self interest and collective benefit. This is also where the tension between self determination and self exploitation becomes more pronounced. So DAO contributors do enjoy the sense of self determination and flexibility that DAOs afford, but without specific working hours or days and nor clear outlines for what is expecting from them. Coupled with the always online lifestyle, many reporting that they were prone to overworking and ultimately burnout. What one interviewee called the contributor extractable value, the amount of free labor that one can get from a contributor. And again, here, as one interviewee observed, the lack of structure and boundaries ultimately means that the people that are actually the most passionate are the ones that burn out and leave. And so they were asking, does that mean they are the one that are less passionate, the one that stay in the space? We actually you know, we we wanna achieve the opposite. Now another big issue that contributes to burnout and exhaustion is the lack of transparency when it comes to work process and the information asymmetries between contributors and former core teams that cannot solely be addressed by transparent technology. Again, one, interviewee, mentioned that often, you know, progressive decentralization is used by former core team members or large token holders to explain a way this power asymmetries, that often contributors are, you know, facing on a daily basis. Now additionally, in contrast to the myth that our work is highly lucrative, we found that contributors are well aware of getting paid less than traditional tech jobs, but justify that with the wealth of intangible value that they gain, again, in terms of network, learnings, collaborations, which, however, are not enough to sustain engagement through market cycles. Again, here, contributor don't necessarily need to be paid more, but they just wanna get paid in a more predictable manner. And like, manner. And like, again, we have a quote from one contributor that said that, you know, they heard many variations of this tale after factoring in taxes, fluctuations in token price, etcetera. They ended up paying out of pocket to work for the DAO. And then relatedly, another issue is that while the meter is the DAOs are owned by the contributors through token, the contributors we talked to discuss their sense of ownership primarily in terms of work process. So ownership of their own work in terms of reputation, pride, or impact. And so not so much in terms of token owned, which has been that is often not enough to have a meaningful way in the decisions. Decisions. And then anecdotally, two interviewees among those that have been involved for longer say they even refused to get paid in native DAO tokens. And if they did, they would take their engagement as volunteering. Now moving on to the last and more speculative scenario, we found that the promise of DAOs to bring about a more equitable future through community participation has then exhausted its appeal. For the majority of participants, this is still the key reason why people are involved. However, DAOs suffer a problem of definition that at times assess the wrong expectations, especially when it comes to community. What makes real DAO unique to the contributors we talked to is the community aspect, which is, however, also what causes the most tensions due to the lack of conflict resolution processes. And then here we also have another quote that basically is one interview. He said, we need to find better conflict resolution technology. Otherwise, we can only rage quit. And this is where also a lot of people eventually tend to lose out of this internal tension. So and then lastly, we found that white DAOs are portrayed as a immutable organization that can last forever. The interviewees that we talked to actually had a very different aspirations for the longevity of the organizations. Many advocated for time bound DAOs, and none of them recommended working for the same DAO full time because, again, in the words of a contributor, it reproduces toxic startup dynamics. So, however, pretty much everybody we talk to, most of the contributors express a desire to stay involved in the long term. As, again, as one, interviewee put it, it's healthy to some set and make room for fresh organizations, especially if we can preserve the collective memory. And so the challenge here is cultivating an environment where people can participate in multiple to have shorter terms organizations while creating and retaining the collective memory to enable the ecosystem to operate and adapting long term. The risk otherwise is that of an external September, where at each bull market, new enthusiastic people join the DAO space only to drop out with burnout at the next market downturn and then rinse it with deep. Then I guess we don't want that. So now Nick will take us through the mechanisms that we've identified that can address some of these challenges.

Can I or I'm happy to jump in? I think so we I think the taxonomy of DAOs is incomplete, and we're we're gonna get if is this a service DAO? Is this a protocol DAO? Is this an impact DAO? I think for sure we spoke to people who saw the predominant or the primary sort of purpose of their organization being one of fostering some sort of impact, be it on the environmental front, the public goods funding, sort of Web three front, etcetera. And that was kind of like our the the second quadrant on the top left corner, this idea that people convey to us of DAOs as impact machines, which meant two things. One being DAOs as an organizational means to achieve some intern external impact in a in a unrelated field, so be it climate or abortion awareness fundraising or what have you, and another form of impact being DAOs as a means to bring about systemic change in the workplace environment. Right? So people telling us about, oh, you know, I got so fed up about working for these big tech companies or start ups, and I really see DAOs as both a means and an end to change something there because it's not giving a healthy life working anywhere else and that being the ambition. So I think the the question of did we specifically speak to ImpactDAOs, we did not use that taxonomy, so it's not in our demographic. Did people bring it up? Yes. A lot. And it was definitely one of the big visions and scenarios outlined.

Yeah. I think given my background, I was peaked and kind of curious about the mental health findings, both in terms of, you know, what came up in the interviews and the discussions, but also, like, the recommendations. Like, we can talk a little more about that, you know, like, in terms of, like, a support fund or ideas of, like, infrastructure or even if there are any interesting examples that you found that were, you know, maybe unique or particular to the DAO and Web three space in terms of, like, how'd be a board meeting their mental health needs?

Yeah. Thanks. I can start maybe. Like, we yeah. The the question of mental health came out, like, in several interviews. One of the quotes that probably was hard to to see was this proposal for a mental health service or support service specifically for the contributors in the sense that a lot of the contributors are facing very peculiar challenges that are very much related to the, you know, online twenty four seven environment, the ambiguity that often occur in text based communication. And so definitely that was something that a lot of people, you know, like brought up as an issue also together with, I guess, DAOs often because the taxonomy is so or the lines between different kinds of DAOs are sub blur the still, you know, collapsing the work life kind of distinction. There were also people voice some concern about, like, again, the intermingling of of personal issues and professional discussions and say, like, governance forums, and and all these kinds of, things. So, and also, I guess, the pressure that comes, with the or, you know, a bit of that FOMO fear of missing out, that again comes with this, like, you know, very dynamic, nonstop environments. Actually, some of the contributors, I guess, maybe the ones that had a bit more of a long term engagement with those, the ones that really maybe were embodying the freelancer mindset, but also share the a set of self care tips that that, you know, some kind of routines that people have in order to kind of deal on their own with the, you know, again, like trying to set boundaries, but I guess that the big challenge remains the fact that there is no concerted effort at the organizational level to set these boundaries, for instance, and, you know, facilitate or improve the condition generally for for contributors. So, yeah, everybody was kind of trying to address these kind of issues on their own in a piecemeal way. But again, something that was voiced was, I guess, the lack of a more sustained support structure.

And here, maybe just to add briefly to this point, one other proposal that keeps, like, popping up here and there sometimes was this idea, like, what can DAO contributors uniquely, like, do to change anything about that situation was, like, a little bit tongue in cheek, but maybe doable or why not is, you know, to have, like, a concerted effort across DAOs to just submit a governance proposal that says we don't message each other over the weekend, or we hereby declare that we do not expect anybody to respond, you know, in under two two hours, whatever you have. And just doing that across DAOs to kind of anchor or sort of make more tangible this social norm that would ultimately benefit a lot of people across this ecosystem who are currently setting these boundaries by themselves and, you know, doubting if they're working enough, etcetera.

That's really interesting.

I mean, I think second that, I think I actually found it curious that it wasn't brought up more, to be honest, but it did show itself in certain things like the the first, just across the journey when people are like, oh, DAOs. You know, I get to hang out with fun people and collaborate and do whatever I wanna do. And then they're like, yay. I'm gonna have impact. And then it moves into this freelancing sort of thing, which is was also a journey, a little bit of disillusionment that we saw. However, still spurred by this grand vision of this is a more equitable way of organizing. This is this one is gonna be different. So maybe not wanting to develop this class consciousness because ideally, we will be doing away with it. On the other hand, within the freelancing three part or scenario, we did have quite a few signals of it, right, when people are like, oh, ownership for me does not mean tokens. Ownership is actually a psychological, like, a sense of owning my work process because I know that having a bunch of tokens isn't isn't meaningful. Ownership in the in the organization, I think, is also what came through there because other people usually, there are whales, there are investors or founders or whoever, who do have that controlling power. And this also coming through in this, like, last recommendation around, the social norms that there seems to be a big gap between how the DAO actually works and this sort of vision, that keeps on being iterated within organizations, but also the ecosystem. And just being a little bit more honest about where we at. But yeah.

Yeah. Maybe one last thing that I wanted to add on the union versus guild kind of problem. Some of the, again, people we talked to were, like, raising the issue that, I guess, sometimes I mean, it's difficult to unionize, particularly in this, like, somewhat of, you know, headless, quote unquote, organizations or organizations in which the hierarchy and the actual authority structures are still really implicit and sometimes obfuscated through this, you know, ideas or, like, performance of the horizontality. So and I guess, yeah, the openness of the of that also makes it, I guess, challenging in that sense. But on the other side, again, these ideas or these pull for, like, you know, solidarity networks or or like a mutualistic networks kind of speak, I guess, a lot more to the guild problem. Something that someone proposes, something that came out of this forum was the idea of having DAO contributors representations in on in DC, basically on the boards of like VCs that are investing in DAOs as maybe one alternative approach to kind of begin to bridge or merge this gap between the power of symmetries.

Well, I know that Hazel, who's also on the call, has been doing a bunch of thinking about it and also, you know, started labor DAOs, so shout out there. But maybe just as a sort of quick reply from our perspective on this research and the role of, like, unions within DAOs, one of the things that we found like, going into it, we were like, oh, and then we're gonna present our findings back to the contributors, and we're gonna, you know, have this collective action sort of thing implementing all the mechanisms. But one of the things that we found in speaking and engaging with all these people was, like, they're busy, and, they're overwhelmed at times. And collective organizing is what they're more or less trying to do all day in various ways, shapes, or forms. And that maybe at this point in time, it's also hard or it's, you know, it's just adding burden to people who are already under a lot of pressure and stress and uncertainty to expect and require them to form a union. Then alongside that, there's questions of, like, who who are the representatives in that union, etcetera, and more detailed stuff. So, like, with that in mind, actually, we've made the conscious decision for these Web three work forums to say, like, no. The people who should be building and proposing mechanisms that can increase security along regulation, psychosocial, and financial are not the contributors themselves, but they're people who are experts and have, you know, capital and and capacity within those specific domains to affect actual change. And so this was a little bit our approach to how do we wanna promote actionable outcomes is target those stakeholder groups first before we require the contributors themselves to engage in yet another form of collective organizing, which we know from historical experience also comes with its own challenges and contingencies. So yep.

Yeah. I think, as you said, it's a it's a lot, yeah, it was in chat channels in the sense that a lot of the conversations happen or coordination and also, you know, fun and and work type of things happen in the same type of platforms through, you know, mostly text based communication among people that perhaps live in very different, you know, time zones that are experiencing very different, you know, immediate realities. And also so I guess, yeah, this is, you know, one of the, I guess, key sources of conflict, like, at that or like a key yeah. Like mental health kind of challenges that people are facing when the yeah. Always communicating with a lot of very different people with no really an attachment to their own, I guess, like, physical embodied reality. Another, I guess, is the the question, which I guess is interpersonal, I guess, perhaps the quote was referring to that, the idea of, like, DAO breakup when there is some kind of, like, a skis within the DAO. And so the leadership, but also the friends, start to maybe divide among factions. And so the and, again, that being something that generally occurs through a screen, through a forum, or, like, through these types of, like, social media platforms adds to the cognitive burden, I guess, that people are experiencing. And, again, clearly, like, something that is very much missing in the Dao space, I guess, compared to other tech environment is a a minimum level perhaps of, like, support that is, like, in built within the, you know, the workspace itself.

Did did you say yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, I just wanna say that that another source is just the volatility and unpredictability and uncertainty across this environment. So people did tell us about when the market turned down the way that discussions unfolded within certain spaces of firing contributors, how decisions about wages were made, like, things like that, and then not knowing or, like, submitting a project not knowing if you will be compensated. So I think the the whole market situation and also financial uncertainty is for sure also a maybe more extreme contributing factor within DAOs and labor.

Yeah. Sure. So Sarah Horowitz founded the Freelancers Union when the Internet kind of came about and did some really excellent work there to provide a safety net for a lot of this this basically new type of worker in the workforce. It feels like DAOs are doing something different. And just wondering how you think that yeah. What's one, do you see a distinction between the type of workers that might be produced from DAOs? And then DAOs are also interested in creating the safety nets for this group of people as well. What are ways in which do you think that these DAO safety nets can be made as well? Because, you know, DAO in it as a as a form of organization is different than centralized organizations in that they need to be more interconnected than central centralized entities. So you need, like, more of an ecosystem launch rather than just like a a singular structure that launches. Just wondering what your thoughts are around that.

Maybe I can mention a little bit or hold up this idea of the white paper that we're currently writing that emerged from these web three work forums. So what we're trying to do there is really draw from the wealth of experience that we were able to gather throughout those sessions and write down requirements and actionable mechanisms that we think we're we're calling them solidarity primitives, borrowing heavily from the bread chain collective. But yeah, kind of like, what do we think should be built and exist in this ecosystem that would substantially improve working conditions? And one of the things because you asked what can we do beyond what, you know, the freelancers union has done in the past, which is which is great, is we have heard about a whole host of mechanisms that we can do on chain. We have magic Internet money. A lot of people are working on better reputation systems. We have autonomous or autonomously enforced ways to split funds across a really large variety of stakeholders. So all of these things are actually quite interesting when it comes to building some sort of Social Security type funds and mechanisms and are definitely things that we're thinking or or that we're putting into this white paper we think people should be leveraging to improve working conditions and retain people in the ecosystem. And alongside that, we also have interesting new ways of generating revenue from the from the protocol level upwards. Yep.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, all. Thanks, Mel. Mhmm. Bye, guys.