zodiac.wiki is a living resource for DAOs. The wiki houses documentation, a library, and a pattern language for organizations.

Learn how to contribute at zodiac.wiki, engage in discussion in the Gnosis Guild Discord, and reach out on Twitter for information on partnerships.

What may have the most impact on the future isn't decentralized digital technology alone, but the governance patterns it culturally normalizes. For this reason, at Gnosis Guild we deal in patterns. Patterns could be defined as events, methods, or ways of being that recur. They reciprocate their environment. They are something that a world shapes and that shapes a world in turn, like intervals of sloping sand dunes formed from wind currents.

In the 1970s, a group of architects spearheaded by the late Christopher Alexander proposed the idea of a pattern language, a series of small descriptions that could inform how we approach our built environment. For example, the design of a house could be arrived at through connecting patterns, such as planning light on two sides of every room or cultivating a garden growing wild leading to a sun facing outdoors.

Today marks the launch of the Zodiac Exit App. This companion app completes the Zodiac Exit pattern, which allows DAO members to redeem a designated token for a proportion of a Safe’s treasury. To incorporate this pattern in your DAO, equip the mod through the Zodiac App available on Gnosis Safe, and then members can visit exit.gnosisguild.org when they choose to exit.

To learn more about and participate in the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

DAOs often prioritize their entrances, but what about their exits?

In late 2021, ConstitutionDAO memed itself into history when it bid on a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The speedrun DAO broke the record for the largest crowdfund for a physical object in a 72-hour period, onboarding thousands into crypto and raising nearly $43 million from 17.5K contributors. But after its failed bid, the lack of clarity over the refund process resulted in confusion. Its exit plan, as it turns out, was not nearly as clear as its entrance.

A short reflection to end the year

​​How you spend the time in your life is precious. The question of how we should be living differently is a gift.

Reflecting on the work of the past year, it’s clear that attention is building. As a recent tweet said, “The first rule of Web3 fight club is you must always talk about Web3 fight club”. The signal-to-noise ratio may be lower than ever, but at the same time, acronyms like DAOs begin to take on public meaning. The question of how we should be working differently repeats.

Choosing to spend my time working on DAOs, I have to continually revisit, reevaluate, and reinvigorate my aims. There are the short-term measurable indicators of success: total value managed by our tools. There are also mid-term navigation points: what will organizational forms look like in three decades from now, and what coordinated feats will they support? I embrace one theory of change that cultural norms, even more so than technical capabilities, influence our sphere of action. That is, while technical capabilities play a role in determining the possible, cultural norms curtail it more than we usually think.

Use the Zodiac collection of tools today through the Zodiac App available on Gnosis Safe. Join the Gnosis Guild Discord if you have any questions about Zodiac, and follow @GnosisGuild on Twitter for updates.

Myths are resilient. Take, for instance, the stories we tell ourselves about the stars. The characters that accompany the constellations, like the Great Bear, the Bull, or the Seven Sisters, appear to pass singularly from one generation to the next. However, upon closer inspection, these myths are not monolithic; they culturally transform in their telling. Even more, these myths are not merely stories, they are also design systems supported by artefacts like glyphs, charts, and cards that carry their resemblance through time.

In a sense, the artefacts that accompany constellations can be viewed as collections of tools to pass on their memory, which are consistently reincorporated into new settings, like in the Final Fantasy Tactics example above. The key to their success perhaps lies in their composable “open source” plurality. In this light, if DAOs aim to be networks in which “collective memory freely circulates”, their tooling can learn from stories like the constellations that survive millennia (1).

Cooperatives, gaming guilds, and the networks to come

This essay is the second in a Gnosis Guild series by @keikreutler bridging cryptonetworks, web3, and gaming. The first essay Inventories, Not Identities focuses on collective, composable web3 identity.

We at Gnosis Guild build Zodiac, the expansion pack for DAOs. Join the Gnosis Guild Discord today to continue the conversation.

The year is 1996. John Perry Barlow is about to declare, “The internet consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself” (1).