Measuring What Matters

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How does a DAO know whether it's succeeding? This page answers that. It sets out what Cohort 3 measures instead, and how each DAO and each lane sets its own goals against it.

Why Not Revenue

DEP 2 had a clear number to aim at: regenerate at least the seed. DEP 3 removes that target — not because money stops mattering, but because for this cohort it is no longer the point.

Two things make this a considered choice rather than a leap. First, the participant-proposed DAOs are selected precisely because their projects have already proven they can regenerate value — so earning is not what they are here to prove again. Second, the DAO in Cohort 3 is a channel for taking a working solution further into people's lives through community. That — the scaling of impact — is what deserves to be measured.

This changes what the seed funding is for. Each DAO still receives $3,000 from Kambria, but in Cohort 3 it is starting capital for scaling impact, not a sum to be earned back. Using it well is judged by what it helps the DAO scale — the three axes below — not by how much revenue it returns.

Revenue is still recorded in full by the framework. It simply changes role: from the target that defines success to one signal among several that a solution is genuinely valued.

What We Measure Instead: Three Axes

“Scaling impact through community” sounds like one thing, but it is really three — and keeping them separate is what keeps the measure honest. A DAO can reach many people shallowly, or a few people deeply, or spark something a community carries on its own. Each tells a different truth.

Axis	The question it answers	Example signals
Reach	How many new people or communities has the solution reached?	People reached, communities entered, sessions or deployments run
Depth	Has it actually entered people's lives, or just been sampled once?	Return and continued use, real cases where the solution was applied, not just seen
Self-propagation	Is the community carrying the solution onward on its own?	Referrals and sharing the community starts, people who move from receiving to spreading

Of the three, self-propagation matters most, because it is the one that belongs to this model. Reach and depth can be bought by any campaign with a budget. A community carrying a solution onward on its own is what a DAO and its community can do that paid channels cannot — it is “through community” made visible. A DAO that scores well on reach but never sparks self-propagation has been a marketing channel, not a community one.

Two Tiers: DAO Objectives, Lane Key Results

The three axes are measured through OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — at two connected levels.

The DAO sets its Objective. Each DAO translates the three axes into its own objective for the cohort — what scaling impact means for this particular solution and community.

Each lane sets its Key Results. A DAO scales through its lanes, so each lane defines the Key Results that express its part of the DAO's objective — concrete, checkable outcomes the pair commits to.

The two levels lock together: the DAO's objective gives the lanes a shared direction, and the lanes' key results are how that direction actually gets pursued. When several lanes point their key results at one shared push, that is exactly what an activity plan coordinates — the same mechanism described on the Owned Lanes Model page.

How OKRs Run Through the Cohort

OKRs are not set once and filed away. They live in the cohort's rhythms:

Set at the start. Each DAO sets its objective, and each lane its key results, as part of the master plan and lane proposals at the start.
Revisited at each sync. The All-DAOs Sync is where each pair speaks to its key results — what moved, what didn't, what they'll commit to next. The OKR gives the sync something concrete to be about.
Adjusted honestly. As the cohort learns what's real, key results can be adjusted — honestly, in the open, not quietly abandoned. An OKR that turned out wrong is information, not failure.

At the end of the cohort, progress against the three axes — alongside the field notes and the framework's records — is how each DAO tells the story of what it actually achieved.

A Note on Honesty

Numbers can be gamed, and a framework that only rewarded reach would soon produce a lot of shallow reach. The three axes are held together on purpose so that no single number can stand in for success — and they sit alongside field notes, the qualitative record of what returned that no metric captures.

The aim is not a scoreboard. It is an honest picture of whether a solution genuinely made its way into people's lives through community — told in numbers where numbers help, and in words where they don't.