The European DAO Workshop (DAWO) aims to explore the challenges and opportunities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Organized by the Institute for Organizational Viability (IOV), the first DAO Workshop 2024 (DAWO24) took place on July 4th and 5th at ZHAW in Winterthur. With contributions from an international academic audience, the event was a great success. The conference featured insightful presentations from distinguished keynote speakers, including Ellie Rennie, who opened with her ethnographic study on the quality of DAOs; Fabian Schär, who shared his quantitative research on DAO governance; and Javier Arroyo Gallardo, who provided a comprehensive overview of the DAO ecosystem, focusing on power distribution and participation metrics. Additionally, a panel discussion moderated by Eleonóra Bassi, featuring Florence Guillaume, Andrea Leiter, and Ellie Rennie, offered a summary of DAO research and multidisciplinary perspectives on future research directions.
Further, the event included four workshops on various DAO topics, moderated by experts in their respective fields. Nathaniel Zollinger from Crypto Finance led the workshop on DAOs and DeFi, Malik El Bay from Dezentrum moderated the session on DAOs and AI, and Andrea Trost and Stéphanie Fuchs from MLL, along with Florence Guillaume from the University of Neuchâtel, covered the Legal Aspects of DAOs. Sarah Nuenlist and Marc Olivier Leuzinger from DAO Suisse and trib3s facilitated the workshop on DAOs and Community Management. The conference also provided a platform for academics to present their current research to an expert audience, fostering exchange and collaborative research opportunities. This included abstract and paper sessions, featuring 11 peer-reviewed papers and 14 abstract sessions. DAWO24 was supported by various initiatives and sponsors: Innovation Booster Artificial Intelligence, MLL, Crypto Finance, DAO Suisse, trib3s, Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Dezentrum, Innovation Booster – Blockchain Nation Switzerland, and DIZH. The European DAO Workshop 2024 set a high standard for future discussions and developments in the field of DAOs. The IOV looks forward to continuing this journey and driving the future of decentralized organizational structures.
The event has shown that DAOs, as a new organizational phenomenon, provide a nascent and nurturing feeding ground for research that can be examined from multiple perspectives. DAWO24 included legal, technical, economic, social, and philosophical viewpoints on DAOs, ultimately answering the call for more collaborative research approaches, as suggested by Tan et al., (2023) in their study on open problems in DAOs. The conference underscored that DAOs are unique organisational structures combining elements of social science and computer science. This distinctive nature of DAOs requires both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to answer the current questions that DAOs present. Hence, the conference promoted interdisciplinary research collaborations, contributing to the advancement of blockchain research and applications with a specific focus on DAOs.