Skip to content

8. DAO Contributor: DAO Dave

  • Balancing community needs with careful deliberation and fair governance DAO Contributor (Tarot: Justice (XI))

  • tl;dr

    The DAO Contributor/Governance persona drives decentralized organization decision-making.

    • Operates in a multi-platform environment, engages with 3-5 DAOs
    • Creates proposals, takes part in discussions, voting, DAO deliberations and governance
    • Manages DAOs treasury, approves fund allocation, grants and investments
    • Believes in meritocracy, pragmatic decentralization, ownership and autonomy
    • Likes to connect with like-minded individuals for a shared mission, community-first ethos
    • Prefers educational content that solves problems, highly literate and seeks knowledge
    • Concerned about whale influence, governance vulnerabilities

  • Characteristics

    • Believes and participates in pragmatic decentralized organizations
    • Holds governance tokens, votes, is self-sovereign, autonomous and demands transparency in DAO
    • Interested in proposal creation and discussions
    • Core personas are deeply involved in community decision-making and strapped for time, most of the others are like-minded but silent participants

  • Behavior Patterns

    • Votes on DAO proposals, on an average intermittent voting participation other than core members
    • Advocates for protocol improvements
    • Seeks delegation to deal with the information overload due to higher number of proposals than governance contributors
    • Deals with cross-DAO coordination, tracking proposals and voting, DAO operations
    • Behavior shaped by design and tooling; engagement and decision quality is affected by the availability of delegation systems, voting interface complexity, reputation systems, proposal clarity

  • Pain Points

    • Voter apathy, small core of highly active contributors, large silent majority, limited turnout, more proposal creators than reviewers and voters
    • High gas costs in DAO transactions
    • Complex governance systems
    • Token concentration
    • Information overload
    • Lack of transparency and onboarding barriers

  • Engagement Hooks

    • Moderate to high with DAOs
    • Focused on specific DAOs
    • Reputation and influence in DAOs

  • Primary Platforms

    • Discord governance channels
    • On-chain governance platforms
    • Delegation for scaling decision making participation through off-chain solutions like Snapshot

  • Tech Affinity

    • On-chain and Off-chain Voting Platforms: Ability to delegate vote to experts appeals to busy contributors combating apathy; off-chain voting (Snapshot) reduces gas costs in daily deliberations, on-chain voting for binding/timelocked protocol changes and treasury moves, Quadratic voting, Liquid Democracy, Vote Escrow Tokens
    • Sync/Async Communication & Collaboration Tools: Help reduce friction for newcomers who want to draft proposals and ensures consistent information for voters (budget, rationale, implementation plan), proposal quality drives decision clarity, integration of communication tooling with on-chain voting activities (Commonwealth), tools that enable participants to stay informed in real-time
    • Multi-Sig Wallets: Critical for treasury management and security (Gnosis Safe), helps prevent single point of failure for financial decision making in DAOs
    • Identity and Sybil-resistant Protocols: Reputation-based system where voting power is tied to a contributor's past actions and contributions, not just their token holdings
    • Governance Frameworks, Analytics & Dashboard Tools: For transparency, ability to view past voting and proposal deliberations, data driven decision making and accountability (Aragon, Tally, Messari Governor, DeepDAO, Boardroom)
    • Integration of Reputation, Identity Tracker Systems & Contributor Badges: An engagement lever, helps reward and surface contributors, enables delegation choices and builds social capital inside DAO
    • AI Driven Analytics for Proposals: Speed up outcome prediction, helps scaled reviews, eases complexity

How to Target?

  • DAO Contributor Mindset

    • Decentralization Maximalist: Mindset defined by a strong belief in the principles of pragmatic decentralization and a desire for meaningful participation, motivated by the promise of transparent, autonomous, and permissionless organizations
    • Data Driven Time-strapped: Evidence driven but resource constrained, want data (KPI outcomes, treasury, DAO operations) but lack time, prefer concise actionable summaries over raw data
    • Transparency & Accountability: Strong belief that influence and responsibility should be earned through active contribution and trust, not just through financial power
    • Autonomy & Ownership: Prefer non-custodial wallets, exercise ownership and autonomy with self-sovereignty and control over their digital assets
    • Skin + Stewardship Mindset:View themselves as part of a collective, chase success via collective effort, manage a delicate balance of balance personal token/incentive interests with longer-term stewardship of protocol value (treasury health, community growth)
    • Deeply Technical: Tech savvy individual who wants to build and improve the systems they are a part of
    • Eager to Explore: Open to experimenting better governance, risk aware, security-focused, reputation oriented and care about accountability

  • DAO Contributor Motivation

    • Financial Incentives & Value Creation: Desire to shape protocol direction, protecting or growing token value via sound governance
    • Ideological Ties to Decentralization: Philosophical alignment with crpto-native governance and alternate institutions for finance and governance, tied to their 'builder' and deeply technical mindset and the satisfaction of seeing their input lead to tangible change
    • Community, Reputation & Mission: Recognition as valuable community contributors, leveraging crypto-native networks for accumulating social capital, participation and garnering influence in Web3 innovation (DeFi, NFTs, AI)
    • Learning, Innovation & Skill Building: Hands-on experience with cutting-edge governance mechanisms, Understanding of tokenomics and protocol design, expanding crypto-native networks and influence

  • DAO Contributor Must-Have

    • Digital Ownership & Self-Sovereignty: Use of non-custodial wallets that give users complete control over their assets and data
    • Usability: Increasingly demand a better user experience that addresses complex governance, time and gas optimization (batched transactions, Layer 2 integration, gasless voting options) needs, reduce onboarding and daily task friction, mobile-first access and multi-chain compatibility
    • Transparency: Prefer products built on open-source code, with all relevant actions recorded on a public blockchain; aligns with the desire to verify everything and not rely on a central authority, live tracking of DAO assets and expenditures, historical governance data availability, member participation rates and contribution metrics, verifiable smart contract implementations
    • Community: Structured discussion forums and processes for proposal refinement, timely alerts for voting deadlines and important announcements, integration with community engagement and communication tooling, onboarding material for new participants
    • Security: Secure DAO funds management via multi-sig wallets, complete transaction and decision logging trails, anti-manipulation and resistance to whales and collusion issues, ability to respond to critical decision making and take actions, legal wrappers (hybrid) for DAOs, hack-resistant smart contracts
    • UX Spectrum: Cater to savvy DAO participants as well as the new DAO participants with low-friction but fast voting interfaces, comprehensive proposal details that facilitate clear impact analysis with technical depth, and financial implications

Action Plan

  • Research & Refine: Do your own research. Use this template to guide your design, documentation and product feature decisions. The lack of formal UX research reports in Web3 is a testament that this is an underexplored area where original research could provide significant competitive advantage.
  • Design Philosophy: Minimal cognitive load, succinct decision aids, progressive disclosure, show tl;dr, then allow drilling into the details, trust by design, display multi-sig signers, treasury balances, past execution outcomes, and delegate track records upfront, link forum/Discord threads to proposal drafts and vote pages; reduce copy/paste and fragmentation, target speed and efficiency in design, quick proposal review and voting flows, mobile responsive UI, quick integration with Open DAO APIs, systems to acknowledge valuable contributions, fair and transparent conflict resolution workflows, accessible to both technical and non-technical voting participants.
  • Communication Style: Trust matters, use active engagement via governance specific channels (Discord, Telegram, governance forums), enable long form proposal discussions and analysis, real-time updates on community sentiment to guide voting and reduce apathy, reach out via specialized newsletters (The Defiant, Bankless), emphasise community impact in messaging and highlight growth avenues, share open communication with trade-offs and limitations to engage transparency mindset, use data driven, concise and outcome driven messaging without raw data information overload, share relevant summaries, metrics and provide links to details and sources, consistent communication about community development with regular community feedback integration details, communicate via well known community guilds and delegates, their endorsement increases vote traction, focus on educational content for builders to enable customization and API integration
  • Product Features: Built-in analytics, cross-chain compatibility, reputation based incentives, flexible and delegation-based voting mechanisms, proposal lifecycle management, integrated treasury and communications management, unified interface for managing multiple DAO participation, reputation systems integration, automation for workflow execution, proposal builder, review, template and checklist tools, identity and Sybil, governance attack mitigations, feature that provide participation nudges (reminders, explainers, community intelligence to aid voting).

See Also