Speaker:

Stephen Wingreen, College of Business and Law, University of Canterbury

Title:

The DAO Controversy: The Case for a New Species of Corporate Governance?

Location:

Owheo G34 - 1:00 pm, Friday 20 April

Abstract:

This paper reviews the recent case of The DAO "hack" in June 2016 and the hard fork it took in response. It analyses the role and effectiveness of the decentralised autonomous organisation's governance in its time of crisis, and who could possibly be held accountable for the events that took place. Without clear delegated authority and accountability, it should come as no surprise that confusion and indecisiveness followed in the aftermath of the unpredictable event. The DAO was built upon the blockchain and became the living embodiment of a smart contract. Its lifeblood was its code, but its code was flawed. There was no human-led governance in The DAO. Instead, the community placed their trust in the IS they had built together on the blockchain, and the IS became its governance mechanism. This raises the question: When the code is transparent and collectively owned, managed and agreed to by all the individuals of a community, is it a "hack" when a member of the organization exploits the code of the smart contract? This paper explores the implications of these ideas, we argue that whether or not the "hack" was unethical or immoral it was perfectly valid, we also consider the economic impact and legality of decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), smart contracts, work and job design, and what happens when corporate governance is managed solely by IT governance.

About the speaker:

Dr. Wingreen pursues scholarly interests in the fields of emerging technologies, technology and culture, information privacy and ethics, information system resilience, information technology professionals, applications of Q-methodology and Concourse Theory in the decision sciences, and occasional topics on electronic commerce trust, and enterprise systems. His research has appeared in Information Systems Journal, Human Resource Management, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, and Electronic Markets, to name a few.