At present no one knows how societies existing institutions are going handle blockchain technology. No one knows how to deal with securities laws, money transmission laws, sovereign jurisdiction, decentralized organizations, and taxes. There are groups actively working on these problem, Coincenter is one such example. However, innovation can not wait for the legal systems of the world to catch up in order to make progres. It seems we are at an impasse where existing authorities and change meet.
I would like to propose an idea to deal with the ambiguity presented by blockchain technology and governance. I call it the open chain policy. The idea is simple: be radically transparent. Truth is the best policy. The goal is to be honest in your work, and document your honesty for the world to see. Luckily the blockchain is ideal for recording such information. And while there are many ways to organize openness, I would like to share a few practical examples from my own experience.
Open Meetings
At MakerDAO we use VOIP software called Team Speak to conduct meetings. It was originally designed for gamers to communicate with each other while playing video games. It’s a little clunky, but it gets the job done. One great feature is that you can record conversations. A while ago I documented the process for running a meeting on the MakerDAO forums. You could run a meeting like that or you could use Roberts rules of order to structure your meetings. The format isn’t so important, but what is important is recording the meeting and making the recordings public as MakerDAO does with it’s meeting notes.
Be Chatty
Most communications can’t be part of a formal meeting. In order to coordinate effectively people need to talk a lot to to each other. Chat programs are great for that. Many use slack to communicate because it’s easy to use and conversations can be separated by topic. However, slack is expensive to use and the free version is limited to 10,000 messages. There are other alternatives and the best I’ve found is a program called Rocket Chat, which is open source and free to use. Try and make as much of your chat as public as possible. While private conversations are needed sometimes, if a message doesn’t have a good reason to be private, then it should be public.
Governance
Here’s where the blockchain starts to come in. Do everything of importance through some sort of multisig process. Almost very blockchain platform has some kind of multisig capabilities. However, in my experience Ethereum offers some to the best tools for this. The best application I’ve seen is produced by Nexus Development as part of a tool set called dappsys. These tools are extremely well designed and work very well, but they are still difficult to get setup for most people. Nexus has plans to make these tools more accessible to more people, but in the meantime if you have questions you can ask them directly on their open chat room.
All financial transactions, important decisions, and strategy changes should run through your multisig process. Documenting these processes is also important. Chat works for shorthand communications, but you’ll need a more organized long form tool. Forums work well for documenting longer form text, and comments. A good open source tool is Discourse and can be used for free.
Wrap it up
Will this prevent your organization from losing a lawsuit? Will it prevent you from being audited? Will it keep you safe from prosecution? I don’t know. But what I do know is that if you are open and honest it will be much easier for people to judge the intentions of your actions. If you tell the truth and you only want to bring about positive change in the word, then it will show. If you are confused about what you should be doing, but you are doing the best you can, then it will show. If conduct yourself with competence and integrity, then it will show.