but what on earth does that mean? a dao is similar in some ways to some of these a financial flash mobs or crowdsourcing activities, where you get a bunch of people coming together, they put some money into something to buy an asset. the difference is that in one of those activities, there are people who are recognisably running the show and are in charge of thinking it through. in a dao, we are defining it all upfront and then we're letting it run its own course. and this idea can be used for anything. a group of people have got together on the internet to raise funds for a dao to buy this area of woodland in wiltshire, in the south of england, and they can decide how it is managed. so a dao is a way of setting up an organisation that is — that uses the blockchain to sort of manage membership and let people organise around a particular cause or project. the treedao is this project to buy a woodland and then let the local community sort