Is There Still Hope for Crawley Town? | State of the DAOs
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There are many ways to experience community outside of the web3 space, but perhaps there is no better distillation of what it means to be a member a community than those feelings associated with rooting for a sports team.
Last year, State of the DAOs shipped an edition devoted to the intersection of web3 and sports, exploring how groups of fans are coming together to use web3 tech to crowdsource funds to purchase sports teams. This week, we offer a follow up article that explores the fate of WAGMI United, one of the first professional sports organizations to be bought by web3 enthusiasts and powered by a decentralized decision-making model through the use of NFTs.
The takeaway may be that while web3 technology is amazing for empowering fans, it’s important to have a broad sense of an industry and how it best works. As we work to integrate web3 tech into new industries, we must remember that it’s not a replacement for tried and true methods, but a way to augment those to up everyone’s game. And that’s a win for teams, for fans, and for crypto adoption.
After catching up on WAGMI United, take a look at the TL;DR on some of the most recent DAO ecosystem takes and thought pieces, making it easy for you to cut through the noise and learn everything you need to know about the current state of the DAOs.
Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (KAF, Warrior, KingIBK, Quilia, Vi-Fi, Boluwatife, Kornekt, Trewkat, HiroKennelly, siddhearta)
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Is There Still Hope for Crawley Town?
How the Struggles of WAGMI United Highlight the Need for Unity and Community Support
Author: KAF
As a lifelong football fan and supporter of NFT technology, I am saddened by the situation WAGMI United is currently facing and would like to contribute in any way possible.
To give you some context, nine months ago, a group of web3 investors bought Crawley Town, a storied football team in England. Everything sounded promising and they were set for an exciting season ahead.
Unfortunately, things have not gone very well for them.
Despite all the negative news, their recent win over one of their direct rivals gives players and fans a glimmer of hope.
Let's see what happened.
How Has Crawley Town Fared This Season?
As a lifelong football fan and supporter of NFT technology, I am saddened by the situation WAGMI United is currently facing and would like to contribute in any way possible.
To give you some context, nine months ago, a group of web3 investors bought Crawley Town, a storied football team in England. Everything sounded promising and they were set for an exciting season ahead.
Unfortunately, things have not gone very well for them.
Despite all the negative news, their recent win over one of their direct rivals gives players and fans a glimmer of hope.
Let's see what happened.
How Has Crawley Town Fared This Season?
Co-founder of WAGMI United, Preston Johnson.
In April 2022, Crawley Town football club was purchased by WAGMI United after failing to acquire Bradford City. WAGMI is a group of American entrepreneurs and web3 investors with no prior experience in football, including influencers Gary Vaynerchuk and Daryl Morey, the president of the Philadelphia 76ers.
They arrived with grand promises, pledging to transform Crawley into the "Internet football team," providing fans with a significant voice, revolutionizing the broken way sports clubs are managed, and boldly taking League Two Crawley to the Premier League.
However, managing a football club proved to be more challenging than they anticipated.
It's been nine months, four managers, and half the season, and Crawley sits near the bottom of the table, fighting relegation.
The club has made headlines in the national and international press for all the wrong reasons – especially around Christmas and the New Year when the club got rid of star player Tom Nichols and fan favourite Glenn Morris, manager Matthew Etherington left after just 32 days in charge, and owner Preston Johnson sat on the bench away at Stevenage.
The owners' disconnection has caused the fans to rightfully explode, as can be seen through the #WAGMIout hashtag on Twitter.
Have NFTs Been the Cause?
The answer is Yes and No; let me explain.
As a fan of the Real Racing Club, I've experienced similar situations with corrupt presidents and controversies that didn't involve NFTs. In fact, many football clubs have seen fans become fed up with their management, as seen with the recent example of Manchester United.
Crawley Town's poor decisions cannot be blamed on web3 technology. The root of the problem may be a lack of understanding or experience with European football culture.
The fans and owners began on a sour note and as the saying goes, "a bad beginning leads to a bad ending.” According to co-owner Hunter Orrell, there were several areas where alternative actions could have been taken.
WAGMI United owners may have attempted to reinvent the wheel because successful ownership models already exist, such as Real Madrid's system where the “socios” hold decision-making power without the use of NFTs.
In sports, success depends on unity among fans, coaching staff, management, and players. As a player, you know the power of local supporters' chants on the field. To achieve this, it's essential to have a deep understanding of the sport and a strong connection with the community, especially for smaller teams like Crawley.
While web3 technology presents potential advantages for football, it's crucial to maintain some of the game's traditions. WAGMI's failure to embrace the web3 culture in Crawley may have contributed to their lack of success.
All this being said, I believe football can be ruthless as winning is everything. To keep fans happy, teams simply have to win.
Hope Prevails
Not everything is lost.
The recent victory against a direct relegation rival, Harrogate Town, has sparked a renewed sense of hope and optimism among the supporters.
With 12 games remaining in the season, the possibility of remaining in League 2 for another year has once again become a viable option. Each upcoming match is a critical final that must be approached with utmost determination and focus.
As the next game falls on Saturday, March 18th, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my best wishes and good luck to the team.
As a community, we often talk about the importance of collaboration and working together to achieve our goals. This is one such moment where we can show our support. Although mistakes have been made, it's vital to provide constructive support rather than criticism and insults.
The consortium has been clear with its intentions from the start, they are here for the long haul and they want it to be a success. So, let's unite behind the team to help them avoid relegation, and once the season concludes, evaluate what went wrong to make necessary improvements.
WAGMI!
Actions steps
📖 Read DAOs Give Fans a Sporting Chance | State of the DAOs
⛏️ Dig into web3 projects aim to create engagement between fans and sports leagues | Rachel Wolfson
🙏 Sponsor: Game7 DAO is launching Summon, the new, gamified, meritocratic governance tool for DAOs.
Ecosystem Takes
🔥 and 🧊 insights from across the DAO ecosystem
Community Health - An Imperative for Web3 Communities
Author: peth
🔑 Insights: The web3 space is full of uncertainties and challenges and this makes monitoring the health of communities paramount. Communities consist of individuals who come together to interact and share a common goal. There are factors that drive community health and others that inhibit it. Overall, keeping track of community health is vital to the growth of decentralized organizations.
Challenges surrounding participation and engagement in web3 spaces have increased the need to look into community health.
Community health is essential for web3 communities to survive and thrive, while those who neglect it will scatter and fragment.
A community is composed of multiple layers, including individuals, subgroups, cliques, and the broader ecosystem. These layers serve as the basis for gathering data to evaluate community health.
Striking a balance between an overall community ethos and vision while nurturing sub-groups for enrichment and diversity is essential for maintaining a healthy community. A community is healthy when it meets members' needs, promotes relationships, advances collective goals, and exists in a healthy ecosystem.
An Introduction to: “Governance as Conflict: Constitution of Shared Values Defining Future Margins of Disagreement”
Author: BlockScience
🔑 Insights: While seemingly contradictory, conflict is a valuable tool to optimize the functioning of any organization or group. A group of individuals with similar goals adopt certain structures and governance mechanisms that translate, directly or indirectly, the members’ choices.
As the organization continues to achieve its goals, certain situations arise, such as loss of individual autonomy and an increase in distinctiveness of member preferences. These two end results coalesce into disagreements, debates, and eventually conflict.
Conflict can be mitigated by:
Constitutionalizing and streamlining the set of values and ideals that make it to the organization.
Dealing with conflict using system division tools such as parallel systems, horizontal and vertical systems, subsidiary units and more.
Conflicts can be resolved by:
Integrating the court system in modern-day organizations for resolving differences. This protects the interests of individuals from majority ruling.
Using computer-aided governance solutions by utilizing machine learning.
Me and My Digital Self
Author: Samantha Marin
🔑 Insights: The idea of a digital spirit and an algorithm more robust than oneself is fascinating. When we hop onto the internet, we tend to create a smarter, prettier model of ourselves, sometimes to the extent that is not really us anymore. To see the bigger picture of the DAO space more easily and to help navigate the often scary digital world that we live in, it’s helpful to view digital identities as tools used by people.
The chronically online are the chronically lonely people.
IRL spaces are insufficient in supplying the needs of humans to see and be seen.
DAOs are drawing rooms for digital identities with different inspirations.
The motivations of digital identities create the direction for the DAO.
Bankless Academy - A Gitcoin Passport Case Study
Author: Rohit Malekar
🔑 Insights: Certain actors exist who access social platforms on the internet with false identities. There is a need for a structure that detects such actors and denies them access to the platforms. This case study assesses how Bankless Academy utilizes Gitcoin Passport to stop malicious actors from earning educational credentials.
Bankless Academy is an open source and freely accessible educational platform that offers lessons to web3 users. Upon completion of the lessons, users can mint on-chain badges, indicating progress in the lessons.
Gitcoin Passport enables users to link their credentials from web2 or web3 sources, like a Google or Twitter profile, or an ETH balance or Snapshot history. Having presented a trusted credential, users can get a stamp generated on their passports without storing any of their data.
While integrated with Gitcoin Passport, Bankless Academy users were required to have some stamps to claim the badge for each lesson. This gives users unique identities, preventing sybil attacks.
The stamp requirements of Bankless Academy show an increase in the average Gitcoin Passport score of participants before implementing the mechanism.
Structure Without Capture
Author: Dave Ehrlichman
🔑 Insights: DAOs are falling short of their potential because, like all non-hierarchical organizations, they don’t have a structure to delegate roles, responsibilities, and authorities to get things done. Structure without capture means adopting “structure legos”, which are fit-for-purpose structures that unlock new capabilities in DAOs and is a way to give the structure its place within the self-organizing organism of a DAO.
In DAOs, there is no mechanism to assign or ensure that the right people are claiming responsibilities. This is the tragedy of responsibility commons.
Hierarchies create structure with capture.
DAOs have evolved to take a network approach to coordination and favor collective decision making over unilateral control.
Means of delegating or revoking roles and authorities in a way that still reinforces decentralization of power is needed to address the tragedy of the responsibility commons in non-hierarchical organizations.
DAO Spotlight: RnDAO
Author: Boluwatife
RnDAO is the abbreviated form of Research n’ DAO. It is a decentralised organisation that acts as an innovation center with a mission to empower human collaboration by operating as a groupware-focused enterprise builder that puts research first.
RnDAO is a DAO, funded by other DAOs, to develop research and tools to help the DAO ecosystem grow and reach its maturity. RnDAO believes that DAOs are an ideal part of web3 and the space has significant advantages. Some of the advantages are tapping into raw talent, risk mitigation, and a generous feedback loop, but to do this, and implement this seamlessly, DAO tooling is important. DAO tooling in this sense isn't something purely physical or tangible. It could be:
Software applications, procedures and methods, or an accepted pattern of behavior
Frameworks as mental simulations that can be implemented to design tools and processes
Deep research into the knowledge and 'know-how' of the DAO ecosystem to ensure the application of adequate practices
RnDAO works as a research and development DAO. As it stands there are still no DAO experts, but RnDAO provides us with the opportunity to use tools to augment DAO processes.
How They Work
RnDAO plans on addressing the tooling process and knowledge gap in DAOs by drawing ideas from web2 joint initiatives. As envisioned, projects are developed through knowledge sharing and collaborative enterprises, which can lead to a model that enables a decentralized and collaborative ecosystem.
RnDAO’s vision is to have an "inter-DAO R&D Lab and Ecosystem hub combining deep Governance and organizational Design expertise with Human-Centered Design, to offer collaborative R&D and community."
Join the Community
If you're interested in knowing more about how this works, connect with them on Twitter or read the various published articles they have released on their Mirror page.
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