Overview

The DAO Experimentation Program (DEP) is Kambria's open innovation initiative exploring how decentralized communities can co-create real value through collective intelligence, transparent coordination, and co-ownership.

Cohort 1 showed that people from very different backgrounds can collaborate effectively through a DAO. Cohort 2, still running, is testing whether a DAO can regenerate its own funding rather than simply spend a grant. Cohort 3 builds on both and turns to the question underneath them: what makes a community strong enough to hold together — to keep creating, coordinating and sharing value — with real infrastructure under it and less and less scaffolding from Kambria.

DEP 3 pursues this along two tracks that run side by side:

•   Operations Excellence: putting the Kambria DAOs Framework to work in a real cohort — automated revenue flows, contributor payments, and transparent records — so the operational foundation is proven, not just built.
•   Impact: two lines of work. Ownership development — decentralization happens when each person owns their work and its outcomes, not when tasks are handed down; and open innovation through participant-proposed DAOs — social-impact projects that already have a working solution, proven regeneration, and a local community use the DAO as a new channel for business development and for scaling impact, bringing their solution into people's lives through community.

This note explains why DEP 3 exists and what it is. The companion tabs in this documentation cover how it works, how to take part, and how each DAO is run.

Purpose

Cohort 3 continues Kambria's mission:

To explore how global citizens can co-create, govern, and execute community projects through decentralized methods.

It focuses that mission into one question that ties the cohort's three lines of work together:

Can a community — given real infrastructure and genuine ownership — carry a solution that already works further into people's lives, and keep doing it with less and less scaffolding from Kambria?

That single question becomes concrete along the cohort's three focuses:

• Operations Excellence — does a proven, transparent framework make it genuinely easier for a community to create, coordinate, and share value?
• Ownership development — when people are given a real area of work to own, rather than tasks to wait for, do they actually own it?
• Open innovation through participant-proposed DAOs — can a community-run DAO scale a working solution's impact in a way paid channels cannot?

We do not claim to know the answers, and that is deliberate. DEP 3 is run as an expedition rather than a curriculum: Kambria is not teaching a proven model, it is exploring these questions alongside the participants and documenting honestly whatever emerges — including the parts that do not work.

In Cohort 3 this exploration takes concrete form along two lines.

• Ownership development. Decentralization is not a structure you declare; it happens when each person genuinely owns their work and its outcomes, rather than waiting for tasks to be handed down. Much of this cohort is about building that ownership in practice — which is what the Owned Lanes model, described later, exists to do.
• Open innovation through participant-proposed DAOs. Most of the cohort's DAOs are built around selected social-impact projects that already have a working solution, proven regeneration, and a local community behind them. For these projects, the DAO is not an experiment in governance for its own sake — it is a new channel for business development and for scaling impact: a way to take a solution that already works further into people's lives through community.

General Design Principles

Each DAO in DEP 3 is designed around three balanced pillars.

1. Genuine Connection

Real relationships between people — not between people and a platform. Every DAO is structured so that members work closely enough, and long enough, for trust to form. In this cohort connection is a primary outcome, not a by-product, because it belongs to a longer timeframe than the programme itself.

2. Value Demonstrated, Not Explained

DAOs create real value, serve real people, and receive real money. Nothing about the material layer is set aside. What changes is the order of the logic: value is created first, and what comes back is observed rather than chased.

3. Transparent Operations

Every DAO runs on the Kambria DAOs Framework, with on-chain records and public logs. Whatever happens, the numbers are visible, and nobody has to take anyone's word for it.

What’s New in DEP 3: Owning, Not Just Doing

Across earlier cohorts, one pattern kept surfacing: members who were unsure what to do, or how, would wait — and waiting was read as low ownership. Giving people more guidance and samples helped them complete tasks, but it did not, by itself, make the work feel like theirs.

DEP 3 introduces a collaboration model built to close that gap. The full mechanics live in the How It Works tab; in short, each DAO's work is organised into owned lanes, grouped under a few broad scopes:

•   Ownership with edges. A lane is a real, continuing area of the DAO's work — not a task handed down, but a stream that belongs to the people who run it, with their names on the outcome.
•   Held in pairs. Each lane is held by two people, so nobody carries it alone and nobody quietly disappears. The pair decides how to run their lane, within clear boundaries, without asking permission for every step.
•   A running start. Every lane comes with a launch kit — a guideline, one worked example, and a short starter plan — enough to get moving through the first weeks, after which the lane is genuinely theirs.
•   A monthly rhythm. Once a month all the DAOs gather. Each pair shares what their lane will do next and what happened last month — presenting to the wider cohort, not graded by Kambria.

One lane in every DAO is dedicated to welcoming new people and turning sign-ups into active contributors — so the inactivity that earlier cohorts struggled with becomes a stream someone owns, rather than a vague problem nobody holds.

Sustainability Starts with How a DAO Runs

In Cohort 2, sustainability was measured one way: could a DAO regenerate at least the value of its seed funding? Revenue was the test.

But revenue is only part of what keeps a DAO alive. A DAO where work stalls because no one is sure who owns it, where money isn't tracked and trust erodes — that DAO doesn't last, whether or not money is coming in. 

What a DAO needs first is an effective operating model: clear ownership of the work, infrastructure that handles value transparently, and a rhythm that keeps things moving. Running well isn't separate from sustainability — it is one of its core factors, and the one most often missing.

So Cohort 3 changes where it puts its attention. The focus is on building a DAO that runs well — the work that Operations Excellence and ownership development are about.

This fits the projects in the cohort. The participant-proposed DAOs are selected because their projects have already proven they can regenerate value — earning is not the open question. Running as a community-owned DAO, and using it to take a working solution further, is.

And a DAO that runs well is built to do something with that — to take a working solution further into people's lives. So what tells a DAO it is succeeding is the scaling of impact: how far a solution reaches, how deeply it enters people's lives, and whether the community carries it onward on its own. The Measuring What Matters page describes how each DAO sets and tracks this.

The Cohort 3 DAOs

Cohort 3 runs four DAOs: Kambria's model DAO, the Capacity Exchange DAO, alongside three participant-proposed DAOs, each built around a selected social-impact project.

Capacity Exchange DAO (CED)

Kambria's model DAO · continues from Cohort 2. Members run the operations behind the CED platform's 1–1 sessions: bringing in Guides and Explorers, helping sessions actually happen, and finding partners and sponsors. The people exchanging skills are the users; the DAO's work is to make that exchange thrive and sustain itself. CED is built to keep operating beyond the cohort.

The Participant-Proposed DAOs

The other three DAOs are proposed by participants — each one a social-impact project that comes into the cohort with its own solution and its own community. Rather than Kambria defining these DAOs in advance, they are selected against clear criteria:

•   An innovation solution in hand. The project already has a working innovation — not just an idea
•   Regeneration proven. It has shown it can regenerate value, not only spend it
•   A local community. It is rooted in a real community that its solution serves

For these projects, the DAO is a new channel: a way to take a solution that already works and scale its reach and its impact through community — putting it further into people's lives. What each of these DAOs does, and how it organises its work, is defined in its own master plan, which is the first real act of ownership in the cohort.

How Projects and Members Are Brought In

Selection happens in an order that matters. Projects are chosen first; then members are recruited into the cohort knowing which DAO they are joining — so that people can align with a project's mission and bring relevant experience to it, rather than being assigned to a DAO after the fact. This is a change from earlier cohorts, and it is deliberate: people commit more fully to work they chose with open eyes.

How the DAOs Work Together

The DAOs are designed to strengthen one another rather than run in parallel. CED can connect people across the projects; a project's community can find one another through exchange; and the projects can share what they learn about scaling through community. Cross-DAO collaboration is encouraged and, where it generates value, flows through the same transparent framework as everything else.

DEP 3 in the Bigger Picture

Cohort 1 showed that impact can happen. Cohort 2 is testing whether regeneration can happen. Cohort 3 asks whether what has been built can stand on its own — proven infrastructure, communities that own their work, and a way of creating value that does not depend on scarcity to motivate it.

Rather than extending the roadmap outward, Kambria is focusing it: bringing the framework to a finished, dependable state and making it openly available, so that any community can use it to create and share value together. The question guiding the work is no longer “does this generate revenue?” but “does this make it genuinely easier for a community to work together?”

That is what Cohort 3 is for — carried through with care, documented honestly, and shared openly with the community it was built for.