Hello, friends. Welcome to the second short story about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). This short story will become part of an anthology of short stories: a book. You can read the first short story here:

https://rikagoldberg628.gumroad.com/l/metacartel

Preface: The DAO Wei and MetaFactory DAO

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

                          **- Donella Meadows*, Thinking in Systems***

What is the DAO Wei?  

The DAO Wei is a set of principles.

As principles do, these principles, too, are fundamental truths that guide members of a DAO to act in positive sum weis, in the best interest of the collective whole: the community. This does not mean that members sacrifice their individual interests. Rather, the DAO Wei provides guidelines for helping members find harmonious balance between their individual goals and the needs of the community. As the African proverb and MetaCartel motto goes,

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

In crafting the DAO Wei, I was deeply inspired by Donnella Meadows, a legendary systems thinker and teacher. Her book Thinking in Systems shaped many of my ideas. I was also inspired by MetaFactory – one of the DAOs in the MetaCartel family.

 The DAO Wei stands on the shoulders of these three giants: Donnella Meadows, MetaCartel, and MetaFactory. The DAO Wei would not be possible without them.

** What is systems thinking?**

Systems thinking is based on systems theory, an interdisciplinary study of how independent parts work together to form a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. 

 Donnella Meadows was a proponent of designing systems that are harmonious with the wei of nature. While working at MIT in the early 1970s, Donnella brought a fresh perspective to a field dominated by computer models that attempted to predict the future. She warned about the consequences of over relying on these models and challenged her colleagues to think about systems more holistically, focusing on relationships and value flow.

 Since DAOs are systems, consisting of many relationships bound together by coordination mechanisms that incentivize positive-sum behavior, it is relevant and useful to use systems thinking to understand how DAOs work so we can become more effective contributors and make progress on our shared vision and values.

What can you expect from this story?

In the first part of the story, you can expect to learn about the principles of the DAO Wei. The principles will set the stage for the second part, where you will learn about MetaFactory DAO – an extremely successful DAO that is redefining culture through fashion and transcending paradigms for how we work.  

By the end of the story, you should have some of your own ideas about how you can more effectively contribute to DAOs, whether that’s MetaFactory or another DAO whose values are aligned with the DAO Wei.

Introduction: the DAOWei

Musings from the Town Square

I first heard about the DAO Wei from Yalor - an early member of MetaCartel DAO, a summoner of many DAOs, and a bridge builder. He may have been the first one to coin the term, but I’m not sure - the lore is fuzzy. 

When I was preparing to write this story and thinking about how best to communicate the multitude of ideas that I was learning about MetaFactory, I remembered Yalor’s tweet. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Tweet. I felt there was an idea there that needed to be explored. So I went back to the Tweet’s source, Twitter, and used Advanced Search to find all of the other times people used the term “DAO Wei.”

I was surprised to find only one additional result. It was from Ven Gist, an early member of MetaCartel, a coordinator of DAOs, a design guru, and a MetaFactory contributor.

I realized there was an opportunity to formalize the DAO Wei and think deeper about what principles would be helpful for DAO contributors, including myself - as I, like you, start to contribute to more DAOs and find my wei. 

The more I researched MetaFactory, the more the principles of the DAO Wei started to unfold, and the easier it was to write. 

 The DAO Wei is not set in stone. Quite the opposite. I hope that the principles of the DAO Wei will be used as a starting point to riff on, elaborate, and evolve the DAO Wei, together, as a community of believers. 

By the wei, the actual definition of “DAO Wei”, translated from Chinese, is to get to the intended location. 

** “Wei” is also the smallest denomination of ether.**

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