By Terence Ho | Foundation of HKPLTW
Terence is a Research Coordinator for the Foundation of HKPLTW with interests in history & traditions, social organization & inter-group relations, culture & religion, and economics & politics of Canadian Indigenous People and Visible Minorities. Follow him on Twitter: @hkpltw
CharitiesNFT: A kind of digital-twin NFT, promotes NFTizing physical artwork created by grass-root artists, using Hologram and Holo-DKEY for Crypto-Validation.
CharitiesDAO: A kind of DANO (Decentralized Autonomous Non-profit Organization) with an ecosystem of charities founders, individual contributors and receivers, project accelerators and incubators. This is building more transparent and efficient decentralized donation chains.
In a series of articles, I will introduce WHITE PAPER of CharitiesNFT and CharitiesDAO and discuss how they work for Canadian Indigenous Traditional Culture and Grass-root Artists as one of the application scenarios of CharitiesNFT.
Introduction
In the previous article, I mentioned that CharitiesDAO is a kind of DANO (Decentralized Autonomous System), and why CharitiesDAO pairing with CharitiesNFT could be an overthrowing revolution for traditional charities. As a recap, various traditional charities are founded on strong principles, but ultimately either fall short of fulfilling the expectations donors need, or are misleading in their advertising.
The advantage that CharitiesDAO has over traditional charities is that it is new kind of DAO2.0 with distinctive multiple-structure autonomous system. Because of CharitiesDAO’s uniqueness, it funds blockchain projects via smart contracts, the key for deadlocks besetting the traditional charities. The deadlocks are an opaque process, a cumbersome bureaucracy, inefficient (even corrupted) system. It has been besetting the traditional charities and criticized by the public for many years. CharitiesDAO, via intelligent contracts, can solve the deadlocks. Because anyone can supervise, which minimizes unnecessary corruption in the whole donation.
In this article, I will continue to discuss the advantages of CharitiesDAO and CharitiesNFT over traditional charities and some possible disadvantages. Starting with CharitiesNFT, it provides undisputed copyright protection and authentication. For example, in an art donation event, CharitiesNFT can exclusively in accord with one physical artwork in reality world, for eternal identifiability. When a physical artwork is traded in reality world, its pairing CharitiesNFT would be changed ownership in Web 3.0 Meta-verse accordingly, and all donation transaction information would be digital recorded on its pairing CharitiesNFT, for eternal traceability.
Key Advantages of CharitiesDAO
CharitiesDAO allows anyone (Government authority, NGO fundraising organization, social workers and volunteers, benefactors and contributors, and beneficiaries and receivers) can monitor, inspect and scrutinize to minimize unnecessary waste and corruption in a whole donation chain. Each charity is governed by their respective charityDAO, responsible for charity-level governance decisions. In a typical of CharitiesDAO, there are two kinds of upper-structural blocks and sub-blocks: Government Funding Authorities (i.e. Indigenous Service Canada-Federal Government) whose roles and functions are for policymaking, supervising and granting etc.; Registered NGO organizations (i.e. Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Foundation of HKPLTW-CA), whose roles and functions are for fundraising, planning, co-supervising, directing and policy-executing etc. Each charity is governed by their respective CharitiesDAO, responsible for charity-level governance decisions.
Having government authorities or governance play a central role in decentralized body of CharitiesDAO. While CharitiesDAO empower charities with financial freedom, a central governance body monitors and puts sustainable and influence-free money away from corruptions. CharitiesDAO create transparent and secure endowment accounts. It has ambitious goals for the future of giving the collective potential of engaged donors to rethink old structures of monetary power and influence in traditional charities. In many nonprofits and charities lack the long term operating reserves creates existential challenges for charities including poor predictability of volatile cash flows and allocation of resources and time. The goal for CharitiesDAO is to disrupt this outdated model (Traditional Charities). It will allow charities to receive donations via perpetual endowment accounts. These accounts allow donations to compound over time, generating interest to “eternally” contribute.
Also, there are generally three kinds of lower-structural nodes: Social workers and volunteers under specific NGOs, whose roles and functions are for operating, coordinating, interacting and researching etc. Benefactors, donator and contributors, whose roles and functions are for donating, inspecting, consulting etc. Beneficiaries, donators and receivers, whose roles and functions are for reacting, monitoring and reporting etc.
Furthermore, the unique characteristic of CharitiesDAO is decentralized with certain extent of centralized. All blocks and nodes in a typical donation chain of CharitiesDAO have equal rights for voting and selecting all kinds of specific committees while those committees are fully responsible for making strategic decisions and policies, like planning the projects and pushing forward, supervising and directing the progress etc. To operate with the utmost transparency and accountability, DANO governance in charitable organizations happen on chain. This eliminates opportunities for fraudulent activities. In DANO, a Board of directors is elected on-chain by token holders for a set term. The role of the board of directors is to provide strategic guidance and settle arbitration. Furthermore, the directors establish an finance committee, which oversees the financial aspects of operations and publishes annual reports. In addition, they creating a charity screening committee to review applications, perform due diligence and validate the charities.
Key Disadvantage of CharitiesDAO
However, are the things above all workable? Having a governance authority over a decentralized body might not be as prefect as it seems on paper. It is biggest shortcoming is similar to the current European Union. On paper, EU is an great economic power and seems united in an union. However, creating an overseeing government does not heal division since there is still a sense of nationalism that provides the foundation of what has been built in the 90s.
Similarly, CharitiesDAO’ decentralized body can provide that it can provide helpful benefits from an empowerment standpoint (e.g. empower charities with financial freedom and allow anyone to supervise). But, when push comes to shove, the harmony present is more for outward appearances only. In the decentralized management, there will be inconsistencies in relaying the message to employees because there are no clear lines of authority. Directing the organization’s vision from the top allows for a smooth implementation of its visions and strategies.
Furthermore, the election of the governance authorities in CharitiesDAO may not always be transparent. The commission has the authority to wield plenty of influence and power, but the average person has no say in who represents them in this way or what the quality of the representation will be. This makes it difficult for “anyone to supervise the process of a charity completely”.
Last, the executives are under tremendous pressure to formulate decisions for the organization, and they lack control over the implementation process. The failure of executives to decentralize the decision-making process adds a lot of work to their desks. The executives suffer from a lack of time to supervise the implementation of the decisions. This causes reluctance on the part of employees. Thus, the executives may end up making too many decisions that are poorly implemented by the employees.
New Vision
CharitiesDAO is not simply a “DAO” , but is trans-border integration with traditional charities. CharitiesDAO, with its unique CharitiesNFT, is the best solution, which is based on the concept of Share-to-give that charity resources can be shared best and contributed sustainably to maximize the value of charity, and decentralized CharitiesDAO that anyone can monitor, inspect and scrutinize to minimize unnecessary waste and corruption in the whole donation chain etc.
Bibliography
“Angel Protocol Litepaper”. Angel Protocol. https://www.angelprotocol.io/ap-litepaper.pdf. Accessed 30 April 2022.
This is an opinion article; the views expressed by me. Follow Me on Twitter: @hkpltw And @Terry_Terence97
Foundation of HKPLTW (Canada) 