Maintaining a truly decentralized governance structure would be absolutely paramount. This would require careful consideration regarding voting rights to avoid 51% attacks and governance hijacking. To that end, I would implement a robust Decentralized ID / KYC requirement for all members and issue a governance token that is non-transferable.
A central issue in DAOs (and direct democracies in general) is lack of participation. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of participants in crypto markets today are motivated by the allure of potentially life-changing profits as a result of someone else’s effort - a project, company, creator, or markets in general. These people are not the type to participate in ordinary governance (see the XLS20 NFT Testnet for example).
Given these challenges, I would opt for a Meritocratic Democracy similar to the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol, where only those actively contributing to the network (ie. running a node or validator / participating in the proposal process on Github) have a say in governance.
All members would be required to pass KYC through a predetermined third party using a payment method that matches the name on their passport, host a .toml file on their domain, and provide a valid email address to receive updates.
Lacking smart contracts, a set of amendments would need to be proposed and passed to create DAO Proposal ledger objects and the necessary transaction set to create and interact with them, as well as the mechanism for the distribution of a Governance token. A path forward might include escrows to hold granted funds and multisig accounts to release those funds upon confirmed completion of milestones, though this is still technically not autonomous.
Either a service should be created to subscribe to DAO Proposal transactions on the ledger and automatically send out posts to all social media platforms via API (which could become prohibitively expensive), or email would need to be the primary method of communication.
In order to fund the DAO, I would propose increasing transaction fees by at least 10X and allocate the fees to the DAO Treasury instead of burning them.
Collect and distribute funds for the development of projects or infrastructure that would increase network participation / adoption.
Ideally, the governance token should not be able to be bought and sold; it should only be earned (non-transferrable). The supply should be created from an Issuer on demand, instead of a lump sum being held by a Receiver account. The token could be Clawback-enabled so that voting on a proposal requires “spending” the token.