Porous Organizations Digitally Scaled

What a fluid entity with low friction contribution conduits looks like in Web3. 

Trees and fungi were once small, unacquainted ocean expats, still slick with seawater, searching for new opportunities. Together, they became a collective life form of unprecedented might and magnanimity. ~ Ferris Jabr

We believe this is a model for how decentralized organizations can flourish and thrive.

Traditional Organizations

The method of organizational scaling that many are familiar with is that of a traditional hiring process. 

An organization identifies a gap and posts a job listing. The organization presents an offer to the market from a position of power. The organization offers security through consistent pay and ancillary benefits.

Crypto-native citizens consider the traditional hiring process archaic. Performing role screens, team interviews, leadership interviews, final team interviews to make a serious commitment is high effort and high risk.

Porous Organizations

Low Friction Passion Conduits

Porous organizations empower passionate volunteers to impact the direction and implementation of the larger structure. The hiring process is completely different. There is no interview or background check or even a look at someone’s resume. Instead, anyone can join the organization and start contributing and producing outputs. 

Any* contributor can also become a leader. The core team is there to provide grounding structures that drive operations and ensure outputs, not to install specific managers. Anyone who is willing and able to contribute can take on as little or as much work as they want, and membership of the core team remains fluid. 

By rewarding volunteer contributions in crypto, Web3 is in a way monetizing passion. A less formal agreement between the organization and its contributors reshapes the appeal of working from requirements and deadlines, to shared motives and values. 

*We say “any” with an asterisk because of the clear privilege that comes with having the time and resources to contribute to a passion project. More often than not DAO contributions don’t pay enough to leave your full time job, and many people don’t have access to the kind of information and resources you need to start in Web3. Knowledge sharing is key to helping this space grow and we see MetricsDAO as a central conduit for it. 

Diverse Thought

Traditional and Porous organizations also differ in the privacy of their work. Porous organizations may work on proprietary things but more often work on open source. They prefer transparency and make it easier for new and prospective contributors to work with the existing core team to earn equity (via tokens), experience and network.  The “interview” towards a more full-time pay can then be better directed based on known work in the open system. This allows for greater decentralization, which means more equity holders and more ability for diverse thoughts to impact direction.

High Redundancy & Scalability

The extended network impacts and drives outputs that surpass those that could be produced by the core team alone. Its ability to scale is only limited by the number of people who are able and willing to contribute globally (so pretty limitless if the organization’s purpose is valuable). As the network grows, so does the level of redundancy, which is key for building a more secure organization. 

The porous organization is also fluid in its structure, and empowers subgroups to form into their own fully functioning, self governed organizations. This makes it able to grow in the direction that is proving successful. 

With larger scale and greater redundancy other issues arise. As the organization grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for new members to find meaningful ways to contribute or get a lay of the land and orient themselves. These scaling issues are fundamentally different from hierarchical organizations where it is incumbent upon the superior to onboard a new hire.

Nevertheless it is extremely important to keep and scale an increase of new collaborators so any successful porous organization will strive to address scaling problems and find solutions that make it easy for new members to join and stay.

Steps MetricsDAO is Taking to be Porous 

  1. Established pod meetings are open to the public. We join a public voice channel in Discord and allow anyone to join, either to contribute or just to listen. 
  2. Anyone is welcome to join a working pod and contribute to active projects. New pods can also be created - reach out to us with ideas!
  3. Promotion of ongoing projects internally and externally with weekly “State of the DAO” posts and updates by pod leaders.

About MetricsDAO

MetricsDAO is uniting the best analytical minds in the space to build the future of crypto analytics.

Follow us on Twitter

Join our Discord

Subscribe to MetricsDAO
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.