DAO Primitives Project
The DAO Primitives Project provides a framework, conceptual tools, and practical patterns for building purpose-aligned networks of small autonomous teams that can scale effectively while maintaining coordination, adaptability, and emergent collective intelligence.
Our current organizational models were optimized for an era of industrial production and hierarchical management, creating structures that excel at efficiency but struggle with complexity, adaptability, and equitable value distribution. Decentralized organizations offer transformative alternatives through their core properties: distributed authority that prevents power concentration, permissionless innovation that unlocks collective intelligence, transparent operations that build trust, and aligned incentives that share value with all contributors.
As our societal challenges grow increasingly complex and interconnected—from climate change to economic inequality—we need coordination systems that can harness diverse perspectives, adapt quickly to emerging conditions, and align human activity with regenerative outcomes.
Traditional corporations, governments, and NGOs, designed for stability in predictable environments, often lack the responsiveness and diversity of intelligence needed to address systemic challenges. Decentralized organizations provide a fundamental reimagining of how humans coordinate to create value, enabling more resilient, adaptive, and equitable systems capable of navigating the complexity of our modern world while distributing benefits more widely across society.
We developed the DAO Primitives project around purpose-aligned networks of small autonomous teams as a conceptual starting point for designing decentralized organizations. The DAO primitives allow communities of all kinds to build their own purpose aligned networks that can act in deliberate coherent ways to create better futures for everyone who participates in them.
What Are DAO Primitives?
The DAO Primitives are a handful of building blocks for designing decentralized organizations. They’re un-opinionated components that can be combined and configured to create governance and operational systems tailored to specific contexts and needs.
Unlike prescriptive frameworks that dictate how organizations should be structured, the primitives offer maximum flexibility while maintaining coherence and interoperability. They enable experimentation with novel forms of coordination that can potentially outperform traditional organizational models.
The primitives approach addresses a crucial challenge: how can decentralized networks scale while balancing efficiency with innovation, autonomy with alignment, and flexibility with coherence?
Core Conceptual Framework
Dimensions
At the foundation of the DAO Primitives approach are three key dimensions that shape how groups organize and evolve:
1. Group Scale
Human systems function differently at different scales. Each scale requires different tools, practices, and governance approaches to function effectively. The framework identifies distinct scales of coordination:
- Collaboration Scale
- Coordination Scale
- Constituency Scale
- Network Scale
2. Group Phase
Groups develop through predictable phases, each with distinct needs and challenges. Understanding these phases helps groups select appropriate tools and practices for their current stage of development.
- Conversation Phase
- Formation Phase
- Organisation Phase
- Coordination Phase
- Completion
3. Group State
For decentralized coordination to work effectively, all entities in a network need clear interfaces. State documentation creates transparency that enables both internal coherence and external coordination.
Group Primitives
Building on these conceptual foundations, the framework identifies four key organizational structures. These structures can be combined in various ways to create organizational systems adapted to specific contexts and needs.
Group Facilitation
A Framework for Organizational Design.
DAO Primitives Resources
This section of the knowledge base contains several interrelated components:
1. Framework
The conceptual foundations that guide organizational design, including models for understanding group scale, phase, and state, along with organizational primitives.
2. patterns
Reusable solutions to common coordination challenges, organized by scale:
- collaboration-scale-patterns
- coordination-scale-patterns
- constituency-scale-patterns
- network-scale-patterns
3. implementation
Practical tools, processes, and guides for putting the primitives approach into practice, including:
4. resources
Supporting materials including templates and tools for implementation.
Network Evolution Series
The DAO Primitives approach draws on insights from the Network Evolution series of articles, which explore how DAOs can function as networks rather than traditional organizations:
- DAOs aren’t things… they are flows: Reconceptualizing DAOs as networks with coordinated resource flows
- Scale and the levers that provide DAOs their power: How DAOs can harness both efficiency scaling and innovation scaling
- DAOs - From fractal primitives to network scale: How networks of autonomous cells can scale while maintaining coherence
- Minimum Viable Permissionless-ness: How to balance openness with effective coordination
- Building DAOs as scalable networks: A practical model for multi-scale governance
These articles provide the theoretical foundations for the more practical focus of the DAO Primitives resources.
Getting Started
If you’re new to the DAO Primitives approach:
- Explore the Conceptual Framework to understand the key concepts
- Review the group-facilitation for a practical approach to applying these concepts
- Browse the patterns for specific solutions to common challenges
For those implementing a DAO or similar decentralized organization, the primitives approach offers a flexible but coherent way to design systems that can harness collective intelligence while adapting and evolving as your needs change.
DAO Primitives Index
- framework
- implementation
- patterns
- resources
- test-resources