DAO Leadership as Showrunning: What Do Core Contributors Do?
My first mandate as a core contributor at ₡ABIN is to be the interim leader of the writer’s guild and to lay the groundwork for the guild’s eventual leader, or for it to run itself. In many ways, leading a DAO’s writer’s guild is similar to running a TV show.
In this essay, I’ll draw parallels between a writer’s guild and a TV show’s writer’s room to help guild leaders and core contributors understand what our roles are (or should be!) in our DAO.
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DAO core contributors are showrunners
Showrunners are the executive producers, the ones whose show was approved by the production company. They’re in charge of herding directors, writers, and editors to create stories that make that TV show a reality. They put the show’s bible together to help new writers to get up to speed. They figure out each season’s plot and “break” the episodes. They write the drafts of the episodes to get network approval.
As guild leaders and core contributors, we’re the showrunners in the guilds. If you’re a leader of the writer’s guild, for example, your job isn’t to write, do design work, or edit essays. Your job is to communicate the DAO’s vision and engage writers to produce articles to further that narrative.
Initially, a core contributor starting up a guild does everything — developing ideas with writers, giving feedback, editing their work — but they’re not supposed to keep running the show. An early core contributor’s main task is to document, write, and work on the vision for the guild and the DAO, and think about how to communicate that vision to the DAO and the rest of the world. In a writer’s guild, the guild leader’s job is to train writers on what the blog or season of the blog is about, then send them off to work with other writers, editors, and designers.
DAO core contributors empower the community
Beyond herding creatives and managing egos, producer and screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach says that showrunning is equally about teaching writers how to become producers themselves, as it is about the work of producing a show. In The Eleven Laws of Showrunning, he writes,
“The reason the ranking system of writers goes from staff writer, to story editor, to executive story editor, to co-producer, producer, supervising producer, and co-executive producer, is because you're not just running a show — you're also running a producer/showrunner academy. Even if you are woefully uninterested in teaching/under qualified to teach this discipline, this is the duty that fate has thrust upon you.”
Our role is to eliminate our role, to empower contributors with knowledge of what the DAO is, and how things run. Our job is to draw distinct boxes within which writers and other contributors can do their best work. We broadcast DAO context to help bounty hunters deliver relevant output. We connect the dots across guilds and pods so that bounty proposals bubble up organically. This way, more DAO contributors can “run the show” — proposing bounties on their own, running point on projects, and delivering impactful bounties on their own.
Our jobs as guild leaders and core contributors is to give bounty hunters, members, and other contributors knowledge of What The DAO Is. And then send them to their respective pods, projects, and working groups to give voice and execute on the vision. Javier says, “Most of your work as a showrunner is to communicate information to other people so that they can execute it within their field of expertise.”
Our core contribution is narrative dissemination
If the contributors are doing all the hands on work, what does a guild leader or a core contributor do? We iterate on the strategy. We provide context and guidance to writers. We give them access to people in the DAO or in the DAO ecosystem that they might not have access to. We act as sounding boards to discuss whether the article tells the story or the project supports the vision (as Javier says, “concerns of style and flair can wait until the story is solid.”).
A DAO grows when people start believing in and opting into its narrative, the future it wants to realize. Our jobs as guild leaders or core contributors is to find the best way to disseminate this vision as widely and quickly as possible, so that bounty hunters and other contributors can start doing that themselves and help accelerate the DAO’s flywheel.
If you’re looking to get involved in a DAO’s writer’s guild and write your way into a career on web3, join ₡ABIN’s Discord and send me a message.