White paper · Peer reviewed
The BE DAO Framework
Most governance failures in decentralized organisations happen in systems that were decentralized on paper. Structure alone protects nobody. This framework describes what has to be true behaviorally for distributed governance to hold.
A DAO is usually designed the way a protocol is designed: specify the rules, verify that they are enforceable, ship. What that approach omits is that the rules are executed by people who are busy, who mostly do not read proposals, who take cues from whoever spoke most confidently, and who are markedly more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains. A governance system that ignores those regularities does not become neutral. It becomes capturable.
The five dimensions
| Dimension | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Decision Hygiene | Whether decisions are made under conditions that permit deliberative thinking — adequate notice, plain-language summaries, and separation between the person framing a choice and the person benefiting from it. |
| Cognitive Alignment | Whether what the system asks of participants matches what participants can realistically do, given the attention they actually have. |
| Community and Social Health | Whether disagreement is survivable. Communities that punish dissent lose their early warning system and discover problems only at failure. |
| Incentive Architecture | Whether rewards are aligned to long-term contribution or to short-horizon extraction. Incentives are instructions, and they are followed. |
| Transparency and Ethics | Whether information that changes a decision is available before the decision, to everyone, in a form they can use. |
Each dimension is scored, and the lowest score is almost always where the next failure comes from. The DAO Governance Health Check applies all five in twenty questions, free and without a gate.
Read the paper
Hosted on SSRN, where it can be cited and versioned properly. A condensed practitioner summary is available in the library.
If you want this applied to your own system
The framework is the general case. The Friction Review is the specific one: a behavioral diagnostic of your governance and incentive design, delivered as a written report with named interventions.