A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization constructed by rules encoded as a computer program that is often transparent, controlled by the organization's members and not influenced by a central government.
A DAO, or “Decentralized Autonomous Organization,” is a community-led entity with no central authority. It is fully autonomous and transparent: smart contracts lay the foundational rules, execute the agreed upon decisions, and at any point, proposals, voting, and even the very code itself can be publicly audited.
A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, a type of bottom-up entity structure with no central authority. Members of a DAO own tokens of the DAO, and members can vote on initiatives for the entity. Smart contracts are implemented for the DAO, and the code governing the DAO's operations in publicly disclosed.
From the point of view of HRM, a decentralized autonomous organization is an organization with branches where the branches are operating on their own (i.e. without the interfering of the head/ corporate office). These branches are operating on their own and so they can be said to be autonomous.
The challenge in running these branches is that although they are autonomous, yet they have to be synchronized with overall organizational objectives.
From 2014 to 2017, I was working in modern India's oldest and largest vocational training institution. This institution had its corporate office in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. I was working in the franchisee operations department. I had to go and set up a training centre in the neighboring province of Jharkhand, India. There, this model of Decentralized Autonomous Organization had to be followed. In a country like India, when we travel about 50 kms, everything changes. That includes history, culture, language, food, dress, social norms etc. The same is visible in case of West Bengal and Jharkhand. So, when I was setting up the training center in Jharkhand, I was told by the concerned director of the institute to keep these differences in mind and so go ahead with a DAO model. The concerned director of the institute had in his mind the differences in psychologies of West Bengal and Jharkhand.
A DAO is a blockchain-based system that enables people to coordinate and govern themselves mediated by a set of self-executing rules deployed on a public blockchain, and whose governance is decentralised (i.e., independent from central control).