Conflict-Resolution Lifecycles for Governed Decentralized Autonomous Organization Collaboration

Abstract

Recent blockchain-technology related innovations enable the governance of collaborating decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) to engage in agile business-network collaborations that are based on the novel concept of smart contracting. DAOs utilize service-oriented cloud computing in a loosely coupled collaboration lifecycle with the main steps of setup, enactment, possible rollbacks and finally, an orderly termination. This lifecycle supports the selection of services provided and used by DAOs, smart contract negotiations, and behavior monitoring during enactment with the potential for breach management. Based on a sound understanding of the collaboration lifecycle in a Governance- as-a-Service (GaaS)-platform, a new type of conflict management must safeguard business-semantics induced consistency rules. This conflict management involves breach detection with recovery aspects. To fill the detected gap, we employ a formal design-notation that comprises the definition of structural and behavioral properties for exploring conflict-related exception- and compensation management during a decentralized collaboration. With the formal approach, we generate a highly dependable DAO-GaaS conflict model that does not collapse under left-behind clutter such as orphaned processes and exponentially growing database entries that require an unacceptable periodic GaaS reset.