October 9, 2026 · 3 min read
Talks
One more, if you can forgive the sound: why a scattered movement should gather at all, and what it should refuse together. Collaborative Defiance, The DAOist Lisbon, 2021. The recording is rough; the talk isn't.
All talks
Newest first.
- How to facilitate groups through transformation · Awareness of the Continuum, ETHBarcelona, 2022 · earlier version at MetaFest2
- How to bring groups that don't agree into one room · The DAOist as a Global Connective, Barcelona, 2022
- How one accidental event became gatherings in seven cities · The Story of The DAOist, Mexico City, 2022
- How to steward a community you don't own · Of Moats and Clouds, Schelling Point, ETHDenver, 2022
- How to design rewards, knowing they decide what success means · A Life Well Spent, Governauts Assemblage, 2021
- Why a scattered movement should gather, and what to refuse together · Collaborative Defiance, The DAOist Lisbon, 2021
- How a network of local organisers can run events as one DAO · DAOfest, ETHDenver, 2020
- How to design a DAO from scratch, with a room full of strangers · DAO Design Canvas workshop, Devcon 5, Osaka, 2019
- What a DAO is, as I saw it when the space was full of dreams · Introduction to DAOs, my first talk
Conversations: Harmony ONE World fireside chat with Samantha Yap of YAP Global · Frontiers of Coordination #6: Path of a DAOist, MetaGame's MetaRadio podcast. Every DAOist recording is on The DAOist's YouTube channel.
The full story
Still here? Then you want the hero's journey.
Before the series: when the DAO space was full of dreams
Introduction to DAOs. I fell for DAOs early, when the whole space was full of dreams, me included. Genesis DAO made me the first person to pay all my bills through proposals to a DAO, and this was my first talk about it.
DAO Design Canvas · Devcon 5, 2019. The first thing I gave back was a map: a workshop where the room designed two DAOs from scratch, then took the canvas itself apart and told me how to improve it.
DAOfest · ETHDenver, 2020. How a network of local organisers could coordinate events, pay each other and own what they built together. DAOfest ran more than thirty meetups across four continents in three months.
The series: identity, relationship and shared success narratives
1 · Collaborative Defiance · Lisbon, 2021. The opening statement of The DAOist, at Village Underground: why a group of DAO builders should gather at all, and what we were refusing together.
2 · A Life Well Spent · Governauts, 2021. Reward systems quietly define what success looks like inside a community, which makes designing them one of the most political acts there is. This is where I first named the mother polarity that runs through the rest of the series: the more a group manifests identity, the more relationships it closes off, and the more it opens to relationship, the less its identity holds.
3 · Of Moats and Clouds · ETHDenver, 2022. You can't own a cloud, and you don't own a community. Narratives are public goods, and whoever stands at the centre of attention is only temporarily blessed to steward them. The work is to design attractors that keep people ignited, find language for winning together, and hand the story on.
4 · The DAOist as a Global Connective · Barcelona, 2022. A connective rather than a collective: a place where groups come to sense, disagree constructively and go back to their own work stronger. Flow over control, relationships over structure, process over product.
5 · Awareness of the Continuum · ETHBarcelona, 2022. The practitioner's chapter, for the people mopping up emotional damage inside DAOs: when to pulse and when to flow, perception moves before resolution moves, and why the solution has to come from the system itself.
6 · North Stars, unfinished. The next chapter was about how founders and communities hold on to mission and principle when conditions turn sour. It existed as a talk proposal and a draft essay, Solving for Layer 0. Then my own conditions turned sour, and the series stopped there. Rigorously Joyful is where I picked the thread back up.
Stages I'm proud of having enabled
The DAOist gave its stage to the people building DAOs: Illia Polosukhin of NEAR, Kevin Owocki of Gitcoin, Griff Green of Giveth and the Commons Stack, Nader Dabit, and teams from MakerDAO, Lido, Aragon, Snapshot, Gnosis Guild, Balancer, PrimeDAO and dozens more, across Paris, Lisbon, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bogotá and Istanbul. Their talks are on The DAOist's YouTube channel.
Newsletter
Notes from the studio
Occasional writing on coordination, narrative, and governance.