The hardest part of most large creative endeavors is recruiting, retaining, and supporting top-tier contributors: people who have ideas, energy, skill, focus, and determination to make things happen. This is doubly true for DAOs. @jon’s proposal does not explicitly mention it, but these are existential problems for Cabin. Cabin Labs is our solution, and I think it’s worked really well.
Cabin Labs is close to the ideal structure: an agile, focused team with lots of autonomy and context that’s also accountable to the collective at major milestones. This places the minimum viable decisionmaking burden on constituents and strikes a great balance between efficiency and oversight. It combines the best of both traditional companies and community-run orgs. Cabin Labs mirrors the typical team<>board relationship, but here the board is the community.
Recruiting and Hiring
One huge benefit of this structure is recruiting and retaining contributors. DAOs are often bad at this. Hiring is a high-context process, and it’s really hard to get that context via proposals alone (or even forum discussion plus proposal). Cabin Labs serves as the bridge. @jon can advocate for Cabin to potential contributors, bring them on quickly, let them focus on adding value, see how they best fit in, and then help them present their work to the DAO as part of a longer-term proposal (along with his high-context evaluation of their work that’s impossible to proposal-ize).
Onboarding
This bridge has benefits in both directions: to the DAO and to contributors. Most people are not ready to work in a DAO structure when they first join. I wasn’t. Cabin Labs, and its predecessor The First Fellowship, provided the organizational and cultural training wheels to let me do what I do best (technical and strategy work) while I got up to speed. Not everyone is generalist enough to excel at their main work and also at the DAO process. For example, I’m personally learning I need to provide much more public insight into my own work. That’s something @jon’s done for me for my first year.
Supporting
People do their best work when they can focus on areas where they excel. Every tedious distraction kills performance and motivation. But every job has some overhead that cannot be avoided – accounting and legal, answering emails, paying bills, managing service accounts, etc. There’s also the work of fostering relationships and unblocking people who are stuck. Cabin Labs serves as our back office. Jon smooths all these details away so the rest of us can run full-speed ahead without tripping over any obstacles. The thousands of mundane tasks he does are hard to showcase in a retrospective, but they are absolutely crucial to our productivity and happiness and Cabin’s overall success.
Where to Improve
To me there are two main areas for improvement. First is that there’s more to Cabin than Cabin Labs. Right now the Cabin Labs crew (me/jon/savannah/kaela) has almost all the energy within Cabin. It’s hard to get other initiatives started. But one strength of DAOs that we’re underusing is that they can contain multitudes. Cabin could be pursuing more initiatives outside the necessarily-narrow focus of Cabin Labs.
My second concern is the balance between team unity and separate proposals. While I have my own prop and am accountable directly to the DAO, my day-to-day experience is being part of a team of contributors that all fit together into a coherent whole. I could not work well without them. Nor should Cabin want me to – I’m far more effective when part of a group that amplifies each others strengths and supports each other when we need it. So there’s a tension between spinning out individual proposals while maintaining team cohesion and a singular purpose.
Edited to add: wow this turned into an impromptu public performance review for Jon. thanks for coming to my TED talk.