If we grant that the final result is desirable, how might it be achieved? What are the paths from the world as it exists today to this future, better world where sound governance is the rule and not the exception?
An existing organization might already be taking an annual poll of its members, and if the existing poll asks how satisfied each member is, overall, with the organization (or some equivalent question), then the ACWi (Annual Collective Welfare) for year i will already be known. Computing DCWi (Democratic Collective Welfare) for year i is then easy to do.
The next step is to establish a prediction market based on the DCWi. This prediction market can then be used in an advisory capacity to provide an additional source of information about the bills that the organization is already passing. As this leaves the existing organizational mechanisms in place, and simply adds some commentary about the bills the organization is considering, it should not create organizational resistance.
This state of affairs can then be allowed to persist for some time, while the organization gradually gets used to the idea that the prediction market is providing useful commentary on the bills the organization is passing. If all goes well, the prediction market will gradually become more and more respected because its evaluation of the bills the organization passes will prove to be as accurate as other assessments, if not more so.
Once the organization has become familiar with the prediction market, and has seen how it evaluates the organization’s bills, and the general opinion is that it can do a good job, the stage is set for the final adoption of the remaining mechanisms of a DAO Democracy. Call this “gradual adoption”.
A more rapid approach would be to start de novo and simply create an organization based on a DAO Democracy. This might be more suitable if there was no pre-existing organizational structure and no need to move slowly. This approach does require that the code base already be written and debugged. Call this “rapid adoption.”
Whether adoption is rapid or gradual, we can ask the question: who is most likely to become an early adopter? Adoption of a new form of governance seems most likely by the young, the idealistic, or the desperate. Which means a plausible beginning is with students, idealists, utopians, bankrupt cities, and lawless states.
Some small group with programming expertise will need to spend the several months necessary to get the first kernel of a system up and running for some limited application: perhaps a student group will implement a DAO Democracy for the student government of a college or university, or perhaps a programmer will implement a DAO Democracy for a Seasteading group.
However it’s done, once the first implementation is up and running and seems to work moderately well, some small idealistic or utopian community, or a bankrupt city with nothing to lose, will try it out. Most of these efforts will fall short. Something won’t work, some social or technical factor won’t be quite right.
Eventually, though, an implementation will meet with some success, and the self-improving capabilities will kick in. The system will get better. The people using it will expand it, others will join, the code base will be copied, others will start to use it, and variation and selection will begin. Someone in Somalia (or some other ineffectively governed region) will pick up a copy and start using it. The infrastructure required is some computers and some cell phones. It will start to work.
Any governance at all would be better than what Somalia has, so something that actually worked would start to build up a following. The basic mechanism should be adaptable to almost any situation. Give it bills and the prediction market will sort out the ones that produce better results for the democratic collective welfare of whoever has become citizens and adopt them.
If it works at all, proposals for improvements will be made, the prediction market will pick the likely winners and adopt them, and the system will get better. As long as there’s a base of citizens to start with, and a reason for adding new citizens, it will grow. And grow. And grow.
That, at least, is the hope.
The process of adoption is likely to start small and depend entirely on how well the system performs with a few hundred citizens. If it does well, more will join. There are likely to be quite a few implementations, with quite a few specific implementation decisions that will have an enormous impact on success. When a good implementation happens to be deployed in an environment where the social factors just happen to be right, the system can take root and start to self-improve.
The next step? Code it up and try it out. The first implementation should be just enough to be useful for some small, well defined group, and have the potential for unlimited self-improvement.