Social Choice Around Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: On the Computational Social Choice of Digital Communities

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are sovereign digital communities that are owned by their members and that are algorithmically-controlled, usually by encoding their rules of conduct as smart contracts. Even though such communities become more popular and influential, their governance capabilities are still limited and lacking in quality. We argue that the MAS community holds the keys to improving the governance capabilities of DAOs; and that the challenge of DAO governance constitutes an important, new application area for MAS research that has the potential to have both scientific and societal impacts. Concretely, we describe DAOs and their governance needs and highlight gaps between the state of the art of MAS research and the governance needs of DAOs.