Messari is a crypto research firm that is also building DAO management tools.
Their 2022 trends report has a chapter on DAOs with some helpful posts (see p 149 onwards)
More specifically, DAOs are fluid online communities whose assets are managed by the community’s contributors. The organizing primitive of a DAO is code committed to a public ledger vs. articles filed in Delaware, and the blockchain guarantees user accessibility, transparency, and exit-rights (via forks). A DAO’s token determines voting power, allocates funds according to group priorities, incentivizes participation, and punishes anti-social actions.
I also liked this simple definition proposed by the Bankless guys: “digitally native communities that center around a shared mission.” Where the communities are bottoms-up, flexible, and loosely organized. They have a shared mission and protocol (on the blockchain), internal capital, and enforceable social norms, and they can be used to manage just about anything: an open-source library, an NFT collection, a social club, a newsfeed, pooled labor, etc.
Orca’s* Julia Rosenberg and Maria Gomez tried to formalize the definition, too.
They wrote that DAOs are 1) open-source & blockchain-based, 2) open membership, 3) groups of independent parties, that 4) use a token to govern a protocol and 5) allocate internal capital, with the goals of 6) automating a marketplace or function, 7) preventing collusion, and 8) incentivizing bottoms up community participation.
Some topics covered include wallets, member onboarding, DAO structures, treasury management, legal framework and a few examples of areas where DAOs have gotten some good traction: Venture and Curation which includes examples of networks that aggregate and organize information relevant to the community