💡 In simple words: Some groups on the internet have no boss: the members vote on everything, and a computer program applies the rules automatically. These groups are called DAOs. People often ask if WikiDeal is one of them. The honest answer: this is not a yes or no question. Being like a DAO comes in degrees, like a dimmer, not a light switch. WikiDeal already shares the big idea, the people who use it should be the ones who decide, together, and it wants to move further in that direction, step by step.

🎯 In 20 seconds (expert summary): A DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is an organization whose coordination rules are encoded in software, typically smart contracts on a blockchain, with membership and voting rights often represented by tokens; Aragon is a well-known platform for creating them. This page rejects the binary framing of the question "is WikiDeal a DAO". Published research treats decentralization and autonomy as matters of degree, not yes or no properties (Hassan and De Filippi 2021; Sharma et al. 2023; Fritsch et al. 2022; BIS 2021, all verified online). WikiDeal is described the same way: participatory, decentralized in intent, and partially autonomous, a semi-autonomous guidance rather than fully automated rule. There is a degree of DAO-ness, and whether the full label applies is not the important question. A draft section compares WikiDeal trait by trait with the classic characteristics of open source development (Mockus, Fielding and Herbsleb 2002). The page also situates WikiDeal within an emerging culture of decentralized, participatory governance that exists independently of it, proposes transmission of responsibilities (renewal of the people in charge) as a key indicator of real autonomy and decentralization, and points to a taxonomy of cooperation and collaboration developed by Florence Devouard, published in the WikiSkills Handbook on Wikibooks. Status: initial hypothesis, to be reviewed and validated before adoption.

Is WikiDeal a DAO?

Status: initial hypothesis (first base position), to be reviewed and validated before adoption. This page takes no technology decision; it situates WikiDeal with respect to a model that readers from the crypto world often ask about.

What is a DAO

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an organization whose rules of coordination are encoded in software rather than enforced by managers. In the usual sense of the crypto ecosystem:

the rules live in smart contracts deployed on a blockchain, so they execute automatically and are hard to change unilaterally;
membership and voting rights are typically represented by tokens, and decisions (spending the shared treasury, changing the rules) are taken by token-holder votes;
there is no central management: in principle, the organization is owned and steered by its members.

Aragon is one of the best-known platforms for creating and operating DAOs, and the Ethereum community documentation presents DAOs as member-owned communities without centralized leadership. The idea has real history behind it, including hard lessons: The DAO, an early venture fund of this kind launched in 2016, collapsed after a flaw in its code was exploited, a reminder that encoding governance in software does not remove the need to govern the software itself.

So, is WikiDeal one?

The question is usually asked as a yes or no question, and this page declines to answer it that way. An organization is not simply a DAO or not a DAO: it has a degree of DAO-ness, a position on a continuum of decentralization and autonomy. Framing it as all or nothing, entirely a DAO or not one at all, hides what actually matters. The comparison below gives the facts first; the next section gives the evidence for treating the question as a matter of degree.

In the strict sense of the crypto ecosystem, WikiDeal would not qualify. It does not particularly rely on a blockchain: its starting point is technology neutrality, and distributed ledgers are only one of the tracks being explored (see Blockchains and smart contracts). There is no token, and voting rights are intended to follow the principle of one user, one vote, not one token, one vote.

Measured as a degree, however, WikiDeal shares much of the direction of travel. It is intended to be participatory and quite decentralized, and the tendency envisaged is a strong evolution toward the model that the DAOs of the crypto ecosystem pursue: an organization owned by its users, with rules that are public, votes that decide, and a treasury governed collectively. Its autonomy is intended to be partial by design: rather than fully automated rule enforcement, the working hypothesis is a semi-autonomous guidance, where software supports and structures decisions while people keep the last word. There are aspects of a DAO here, a real degree of DAO-ness, and whether the full label applies is not the important question. The question mark in the title of this page is deliberate: the question is intended to stay open, because autonomy is never total and neither is decentralization; WikiDeal would always be more or less autonomous rather than definitively one or the other. Strictly speaking, WikiDeal is not even a single organization: it is an ecosystem, diversified across many user groups and chapters, and therefore broader than the DAO frame in any case.

As with Wikipedia, the interesting question sits a little elsewhere. Wikipedia is not a DAO either, yet it is one of the largest examples of decentralized, self-governing online production. What makes it work is not the technology of enforcement but the quality of its decision processes. The same holds for the WikiDeal hypothesis: the useful question is not which chain the rules run on, but who gets to decide, how, and with what legitimacy.

A degree, not a label: what research says

Treating DAO-ness as a spectrum is not a rhetorical convenience of this page. It is how published analyses of DAOs increasingly work. Four verified sources:

Hassan and De Filippi (2021), in the peer-reviewed journal Internet Policy Review, analyse the definitional debates around DAOs and show that both defining properties are contested precisely because they come in degrees: it is debated whether a DAO must be decentralized only at the infrastructure level or also in its governance, and whether it must be fully autonomous and fully automated or whether autonomy can be interpreted in a weaker sense, with humans still involved.
Sharma et al. (2023) studied ten DAOs empirically and defined metrics for what they explicitly call the degrees of decentralization and autonomy. They found that these degrees vary widely between DAOs and change over time: several prominent token-based DAOs showed poor decentralization in voting, while decentralization improved over time in one-person-one-vote DAOs such as Proof of Humanity.
Fritsch, Mueller and Wattenhofer (2022) measured the distribution of voting power in three prominent DAO governance systems on Ethereum (Compound, Uniswap, ENS) and documented how organizations that are decentralized on paper can be concentrated in practice.
The Bank for International Settlements (2021) described a decentralisation illusion in decentralized finance: even organizations built entirely on blockchains retain elements of central coordination, because the need for governance makes some level of centralisation hard to avoid.

The consequence for WikiDeal: claiming to be a DAO outright would be as misleading as denying any kinship with them. Organizations that carry the label are more or less decentralized, more or less autonomous, and their position moves over time. The honest description of WikiDeal is therefore a position and a direction: participatory, decentralized in intent, partially autonomous, with the intention to move further along the spectrum as its governance matures.

A worked example: WikiDeal and the classic traits of open source development (draft)

Status: draft comparison, an early sketch to be reviewed. It illustrates the thesis of this page: a degree of DAO-ness can be discussed trait by trait, instead of arguing about a label.

Long before DAOs, research on open source software described organizations that were already decentralized and largely self-organizing. Mockus, Fielding and Herbsleb (2002), already cited in Voting research and experience, summarize the traits most often mentioned: such systems are built by potentially large numbers of volunteers (while noting that some projects are supported by companies and some participants are not volunteers); work is not assigned, people undertake the work they choose to undertake; there is no explicit system-level design; and there is no project plan, schedule or list of deliverables. Comparing WikiDeal with these traits, one by one, gives a concrete picture of its intended degree of decentralization:

Built by large numbers of volunteers. Yes, deeply: this is an intention of WikiDeal. The model is not built on corporate backing, and company support would be considered case by case (see below).
Work is not assigned. Broadly true for WikiDeal, with one nuance: boosts. Especially in the early phases, strategic decisions could boost certain directions and thereby create assignments of work. These boosts would themselves be grounded in emergence: proposals that gain more and more support, carried at first by a small group of early adopters playing an incubator role, both people and structures: social entrepreneurs and supporting places that help cooperatives, associations and independents constitute themselves as user groups, and then by a progressively wider circle.
Support from companies. Support from non-profit organizations would be possible. For-profit companies would not be given a privileged position: the working hypothesis is caution, not refusal. There is no fixed position yet: specific criteria are intended to be defined notably by the WikiDeal Court of Auditors, which would specify to what extent companies wishing to join the WikiDeal venture can invest. The approach envisaged is case by case at first, so that clear policies can emerge over time.
No explicit system-level design. Here WikiDeal differs: it aims at having a system-level design, but a highly diversified one, depending on the type of challenge concerned, rather than a single master blueprint.
No project plan, schedule or list of deliverables. In the early phases there would be plans and schedules. But given the hyper-complexity of the undertaking, everything can evolve inside a simple and informal culture, the one symbolized by the word wiki itself: from the Hawaiian word for quick, chosen for the first wiki in reference to the fast and flexible Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus of the Honolulu airport. Even where plans, schedules and deliverables exist, they stay peripheral: the main activity remains grounded in individual initiative, without assignment of work.

Read this way, WikiDeal would match some traits of this decentralized tradition fully, others partially, and would depart from a few deliberately. That is what a degree looks like in practice.

An emerging culture, larger than WikiDeal

The ideas that DAOs encode in software, organizations owned by their participants, rules debated in the open, decisions taken by votes rather than by managers, did not start with blockchains and do not belong to WikiDeal either. They belong to an emerging culture of decentralized, participatory governance that exists independently of both. Wikipedia's consensus processes, Debian's constitution and elections, Mozilla's distributed module ownership (see Voting research and experience), the free software movement, the Exit to Community perspective (see Governance) and the crypto DAOs themselves are all expressions of this same culture, each with its own tools and its own degree of decentralization.

WikiDeal is intended to be one more adaptation of this culture, applied to a marketplace of contracts between users. It did not invent the culture and does not own it; it aims at learning from the communities that practice it and at contributing its own variant back.

Transmission as a key indicator

How can the degree of autonomy and decentralization of an organization be observed in practice? The working hypothesis of this page is that one indicator matters more than most: transmission.

An organization is autonomous in the meaningful sense when it does not depend on any particular person, starting with its founders. That requires renewal of the people in charge: responsibilities that rotate, leaders who change over time, newcomers who can realistically reach any role. And renewal, in turn, requires transmission mechanisms: documented rules, teachable roles, elections or other succession procedures, and the deliberate transfer of knowledge and authority from the current holders to the next ones. Where transmission works, decentralization is real, because power actually circulates. Where it does not, an organization can hold votes and still remain, in practice, centered on its founding group.

The evidence base of the Voting portal contains a documented example: O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007) followed the Debian community over several years and showed how its members deliberately limited formal authority with democratic mechanisms, including annual leadership elections and recallable leadership (see the evaluation section of Voting research). Leadership that is elected, term-bound and recallable is transmission built into the rules.

For WikiDeal, this principle is posed as a founding hypothesis of its own. The intended path is a progressive transfer of responsibilities from the founding circle to the community of users, described in the soft transmission pages, with governance bodies that the community would choose itself. By this indicator, the degree of DAO-ness of WikiDeal is intended to grow over time: the more transmission actually happens, the more decentralized and autonomous the organization becomes.

The central principle: participation scaled to the stakes

The working hypothesis of the Voting portal applies here. WikiDeal operates in a context of decisions with multiple options, not simple yes-or-no votes, and the degree of participation is intended to depend on the degree of stakes:

low-stakes, everyday choices would stay light: consensus, or a quick vote among the people directly concerned;
medium-stakes choices between several options would use ranked methods (see Voting methods);
high-stakes decisions, those that bind everyone (structural changes, elections of people, spending of shared resources), would involve the widest participation, with the strongest procedural guarantees (see Voting rules).

Token-based DAOs often apply a single mechanism to every decision. The WikiDeal hypothesis is the opposite: match the method to the complexity of the decision, and the breadth of participation to its stakes (see the Voting portal main page).

A taxonomy of cooperation and collaboration

The distinction between levels and modes of working together has been studied outside the crypto world for a long time. Florence Devouard, a former chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, developed a taxonomy of cooperation and collaboration that distinguishes modes of collective work, from coordinated individual contributions to genuinely shared production. This work was used notably in two European projects carried out within the Ynternet.org ecosystem, WikiSkills and Wikinomics, whose training materials are published on Wikibooks as the WikiSkills Handbook, including a chapter of Wikinomics training practices.

The taxonomy itself is published in the handbook chapter on wiki culture, in the section Taxonomy of collaboration: it describes a progression from individual participation and dialogue, through parallel and sequential collaboration, to synergistic collaboration where the group self-organizes and co-edits the work, each step requiring a higher amount of trust among participants. Florence Devouard is credited among the writers of the handbook on its acknowledgements page, alongside contributors from the Ynternet.org ecosystem. The same culture of analysis runs through the book Citoyen du Net (Netizenship), maintained as a wiki book at netizen3.org with a downloadable edition on ynternet.org; the French Wikipedia article on digital culture (Culture numérique) cites this book as an anthology published under a free license by the Ynternet.org Foundation, with contributions notably from Richard Stallman and Florence Devouard.

Why it matters here: a DAO, in the narrow sense, automates one mode of working together (rule-bound voting on-chain). A marketplace community needs the whole range of the taxonomy, from light cooperation between two contract parties to deep collaboration on shared rules, and its governance should support all of them rather than force everything into a single voting mechanism.

Open point (updated): an earlier version of this page noted that no single canonical online publication of the full taxonomy had been located. A published version has since been identified in the WikiSkills Handbook chapter linked above, which includes the taxonomy and its figure. One nuance remains: that chapter carries no individual byline, so the attribution to Florence Devouard rests on the handbook's acknowledgements page.

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