DAOs display organizationality

Organisationality is a concept originally proposed by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011) and was intended as a more granular definition for organisations than the existing binary one. Social collectives are organisational is they display the following criteria:

• first, they are characterized by interconnected instances of decision-making (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011)
• second, these instances of decision-making are attributed to a collective entity or actor (King et al., 2010);
• third, collective identity is accomplished through speech acts that aim to delineate what the entity or actor is or does (‘identity claims’; see Bartel and Dutton, 2001).

In the first and second criteria, there is a reference to collective decision making. DAOs are commonly referred to as “group chats with a bank account”. Without collective sense and decision making, a group of people cease to be a collection. This is why daos-should-be-communication-first.

In the final criteria, the concept of collective identity is also about a shared ethos and sense of meaning. These are the collective vibes that are referenced in daos-are-digital-organisms.