Decentralized autonomous organizations are a fascinating organizational structure found everywhere in the Ethereum ecosystem. However, designing a successful DAO is difficult and involves many aspects such as organizational design, legal aspects, and a roadmap to decentralization. In this workshop, the Swiss industry association DAO Suisse is going to give a crash-course on how to design a successful DAO covering these aspects. We will give short inputs on the different topics and then open for a discussion to cover the challenges faced by the workshop participants and learn together how to approach them. The workshop serves as a starting point to better understand the design of DAOs and offers assistance in how to set up DAOs for practitioners.

Designing a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an intricate task and the literature and practice have called for more research on the design of DAOs. In this talk, we are going to present a DAO design framework that can be used in practice to set up a DAO. We developed the framework within a research project at Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The developed framework is based on DAO literature and organizational theory and evaluated with domain experts and potential users. The proposed design framework identifies three constituent elements (purpose, legislation, business case) influencing the organizational structure– and five structural elements (organizational bodies, decision-making, token, treasury, communication) that need to be actively designed when setting up a DAO. The talk serves as a starting point to better understand DAO organizational structure and offers assistance in how to set up DAOs for practitioners.