Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: A Socio-Technical Study of Evolution and System Design

Abstract

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are transforming how collaboration, governance, and value coordination operate in digital societies. However, most DAOs remain technically and socially fragmented, limiting their evolution beyond isolated communities. This thesis introduces the concept of the Meta-Social Blockchain DAO, a socio-technical framework that reconceptualizes DAOs as interoperable governance ecosystems rather than standalone blockchain entities. Drawing upon computer science, sociology, and organizational theory, this research identifies three DAO formation modes: engineered DAOs, emergent tokenless DAOs, and meta-social DAOs enabling cross-community coordination. Together, these modes form an evolutionary continuum explaining how decentralized organizations evolve toward interoperable socio-technical ecosystems. The research integrates literature synthesis, empirical case studies, longitudinal community analysis, and infrastructure prototyping. Through investigations of engineered and tokenless DAO communities, including the AI Developer Community DAO, the study demonstrates decentralized coordination mechanisms beyond traditional cryptoeconomic incentives. The thesis further proposes a 5D Principle Model — Debug, Decentralized, De-confrontation, De-risking, and Distributed Open-Source — explaining how decentralized communities evolve from rule-based coordination toward self-organizing meta-social ecosystems. Based on these findings, a cross-community DAO infrastructure platform is designed to support governance interoperability, persistent identity, social interaction, and scalable collective intelligence. By bridging social theory and blockchain system design, this thesis advances a socio-technical theory of DAO evolution and contributes architectural principles for next-generation decentralized human–machine collaboration systems.