The RnDAO Podcast

​Every four seconds, another person enters a human trafficking situation somewhere in the world. It is estimated that there are over 40 million people in modern-day slavery today – more than any other time in history.

​In the effort to design organisations to empower individuals and "liberate them" it feels important to understand the big issue of slavery in corporations as it will probably give us interesting insights and considerations for DAO design.

​To make sense of this important issue and its relevance to today’s organizations, Matt Friedman will offer a comprehensive update on this topic. His talk will explore the following:

​- The changing human trafficking paradigm;

​- The relationship between human trafficking and modern slavery;

​- A comprehensive summary of global trends and patterns;

​- An update on emerging legislation;

​- A description of the relationship between modern slavery and ESG.

​- A detailed description of the relationship between human trafficking and business risk; and

​- A description of tangible, practical tools and approaches used by corporations throughout the world to help identify and address this potential problem.

​Matt Friedman is an international human trafficking expert with more than 30 years’ experience. He is CEO of The Mekong Club, an organization of Hong Kong’s leading businesses which have joined forces to help end all forms of modern slavery. Mr. Friedman previously worked for USAID and the United Nations in over 30 countries. Mr. Friedman offers technical advice to numerous governments, banks and corporations working to eliminate all forms of modern slavery and is the author of twelve books. In 2017, Mr. Friedman won Asia’s prestigious “Communicator of the Year” Gold Award.

​The Mekong Club is one of the first not-for-profit organizations of its kind in Asia to use a ‘business-to-business’ approach to fight slavery. Bridging the gap between the public and private sectors, the Mekong Club helps companies of all sizes to understand the complexities of human trafficking and to reduce their vulnerability within their supply chains/business environment. Together with business partners, the Mekong Club is spearheading innovative and strategic projects to achieve a slave-free world.

​Matt's new Penguin book, WHERE WERE YOU?: A PROFILE OF MODERN SLAVERY, has been published and is available worldwide. In this memoir, he explores the early days of meeting modern slavery survivors and recounts true stories of enslavement in Asia. He recalls painful moments that literally changed his life, reflect back on the different approaches to fighting human trafficking over the last 35 years and give an account of the early beginnings of the fight against modern slavery before the phrase “human trafficking” was adopted. As he reflects on the deeply personal lessons learned, his first and foremost goal for this book is to motivate more people to join him in helping to fight this global crime.

Systems Thinking offers us a wealth of insights to design better DAOs. For this session, we have invited two experts in Cybernetics to share their learnings.

Angela Espinosa
Angela has three decades of experience in Cybernetics in the Centre of Systems Studies, Hull University. She's now an Emeritus Fellow at the Centre for Systems Studies, a Fellow in the British Cybernetics Society, and an invited professor in several universities in Latin-America and the UK. She's also devoted to the Metaphorum, an NGO aiming to continue developing Stafford Beer's legacy.

Jon Walker
Jon has worked for over 35 years in the co-operative business sector. He has established and co-managed a range of businesses including retail outlets, a manufacturing plant, and a chain of supermarkets. He pioneered the use of the Viable Systems Model, in both large cooperatives and an eco-community, co-authored the book "A Complexity Approach to Sustainability" with Angela, and consulted and run workshops for 4 Universities (in Colombia, Cuba, Spain, Oman, Romania and for the Government of Victoria, Australia) on the use of The Viable System Model.

Nintynick is a DAO mechanism designer & governance facilitator. Contributor to Hats Protocol, Raid Guild, EvenGov, and groundw3rk. 

Formerly a developer of neurosymbolic AI algorithms. Nintynick shares his work mapping the intersection of AI and DAOs to evolve and augment human coordination. 

Recorded Fri, Jul 8, 7:00 AM - 8:00 AM PDT

​As DAOs mature, questions around financial transparency, accounting and budgeting are piling up. How should these concerns be addressed?

Bjarte Bogsnes is the Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT), author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the Performance Potential", an international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award.
He's been heading up the implementation of Beyond Budgeting at Equinor (formerly Statoil), Scandinavia’s largest company. Equinor realized that traditional leadership and management practices no longer work in organisations operating in business environments that are more complex, dynamic and unpredictable than ever. The company implemented innovative alternatives to traditional management, like abolishing traditional budgets and calendar-based management in favour of more decentralized, agile and human processes.

Ted Rau leads Sociocracy for All - a non-profit dedicated to enabling sociocracy as a sustainable form of governance. And he's the author of two books (Many Voices One Song. Shared power with sociocracy and Who decides who decides? How to start a group so everyone can have a voice).

In this session, we'll discuss the application of Sociocracy in DAOs. Join us with your questions and comments as we explore the past, present and future of governance and organisation design.

You can join the conversation at https://www.rndao.info/

Humanity is facing an existential crisis. To survive, we must understand how our societies work and where we come from.”

​Tamás Dávid-Barrett is a behavioural scientist, who asks what traits allow humans to live in large and culturally complex societies. His work focuses on how the structure of social networks change during falling fertility, urbanisation, and migration; as well as, how social networks vary over the human life-course. He teaches at Trinity College, University of Oxford, and is affiliated with the Population Studies Research Institute in Helsinki, Finland.

During this talk, Tamás shared his work studying cooperation in social networks, matriocracy, regulating inequality, and more.

Brian Robertson is an entrepreneur, organizational pioneer, and author of the book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. He is most well-known for his work developing Holacracy, a self-management practise for running purpose-driven, responsive companies.

In this session Brian talked about:
1. ​What are the strengths and limits of each framework (DAOs and Holacracy)?
​2. How do we integrate the two to balance those strengths and weaknesses?
3. ​How do we harvest human wisdom in a small group governance process while also harvesting the wisdom of the crowd in a DAO-like structure?

Amy Jung is a web3 veteran. She's an investor at Komorebi Collective (first investment DAO focused on funding female and nonbinary crypto founders), and has previously been Head of Community Development and Program Operations & Strategy Lead at MakerDAO, and design operations lead at ConsenSys Design.

In this session, Amy  shared her work on progressive decentralisation and lessons learned from MakerDAO.

Edwin Jansen is Head of Strategy for Raise / Ian Martin Group, the largest self-managed recruitment company in the world. Together with his colleague, Edwin started developing and spreading Teal practices at Raise 7 years ago; and in this talk, will share the lessons from that journey transforming a family company into a 450 people strong self-managed organisation.

Spencer is a core contributor at DAOhaus, where he helps with product development, internal operations, communications, and tokenomics. He is also a member of Raid Guild, and contributes to a number of web3 projects including clr.fund, CommitPool, and saveDAI. He has worked full-time for DAOs since 2020.

In this talk, Graham will share a new framework for understanding capture-resistant governance, web3 communities, and DAOs.