<pre>
label: Viable Governance: Smart Contract Designing Principles and Primitives
author: sam bacha <[e-mail]>
copyright: cc-2.5-share-alike
</pre>
</end>

# Viable Governance at Scale: Patterns, Principles and Primtives for Smart Contract Design
[TOC]

### DAO & Governance Design Patterns

View the book with "<i class="fa fa-book fa-fw"></i> Book Mode".

## Abstract

We provide a set of basic patterns that are helpful in designing incentives for a viable decentralized autonomous organization and/or generalized governance structures that include economic incentives both tokenized and non-tokenized.

## Axioms and Principles

* Requirements (the need for a new law) is realized by Principle (the to-be law)

* If you are in the business of producing laws, then the law is a Business Object


* Legal elements are not *passive*.

* This document does not seek to define an *imperative* set but rather *relational* sets.

## Legal Patterns for Finding Important Laws

We use the term “pattern” meaning relevant to our protocol, and “anti-pattern” to represent a more subjective interpretation or one that is hard to automate to determine should it be included or not.

## Systems Based Approach


### Patterns

* Law that addresses a problem that has not been defined
* Law that addresses a problem that no longer exists
* The law addresses more than one problem
* Law that has no stated purpose
* The language of the law is vague or complex
* Law is unable to achieve its stated goal

### Anti-Patterns

* Laws that address problems that have not been defined
* Laws that address problems that no longer exist
* Laws that address more than one problem in different domains
* Laws that lack a stated, measurable problem solving the goal, or purpose
* Laws that fail to achieve their goal or lack stated goals
* Laws that lack a citation of references
* Laws whose burdens are greater than their problem-solving benefit
* Laws whose problem-solving benefit and burdens are equal
* Laws whose results cannot be measured
* Laws that interfere with other laws
* Laws that duplicate other laws
* Requires Review
* Laws that are not enforced*
* Laws that violate human rights*
* Laws that are overly vague or complex*
* Laws that have not undergone QA analysis within a specified time frame

## Legal Primitives for Smart Contract Events / Emits

Now that we have established legal patterns and a legal classified, we can begin to map out how these relationships present themselves, either by acting upon, being acted upon, events, etc.

### Primitves Layer
Primitives
List of Legal Primitive Mechanisms
PrimitiveEvent
ExercisePrimitive
AllocationPrimitive
ContractFormationPrimitive
ExecutionPrimitive
InceptionPrimitive
ObservationPrimitive
QuantityChangePrimitive
ResetPrimitive
TermsChangePrimitive
TransferPrimitive

## Authors & Contributing

Sam Bacha, <[e-mail]>

###### tags: `DAO` `Legal`