It has the essential elements to run an enterprise. More or less. The choice who gets paid is determined by everyone, and this payment can be for anything. I think that makes it Distributed and Autonomous. You can do work here, you can document it, you can invest it into the company, etc. I dunno. To me it's like a corporation where everyone is just an investor and figure out how to do something that other people in the organisation want to see done, then document it, and people pay to hear about it... You can use the structure to ... Seriously. I doubt that after the full release there won't be a move towards using Steem itself to regulate even the development and marketing.
I mean, look, people are marketing steem. They get votes, they get paid. How is that not a DAO? Do people think a DAO is an AI corporation? No, it's a free-form, anyone can join, anyone can try doing something, and if other people in the company like it, funds are diverted to reward them. I think you don't understand what a DAO actually is. It's an ad-hoc, geographically dispersed organisation. It could be Dispersed Ad-hoc Organisation as equally as Distributed Autonomous Organisation. It means the same thing.
How money gets moved around is the product of smart contracts, plus people's votes, plus their vested steem power, plus their reputation. This is governance.
anyway. I say Steem is a DAO.
Yup I've talked about this in my music initiative :) - https://steemit.com/business/@kevinwong/steemit-and-the-dance-music-scene
Would be sweet if there are smart contracts, but for now, self-organization, rep, and casual trust will do as long as there's no promise of financial returns for the DAO, but other intangibles.
It's coming. Name registration for a name smart contract with a registration rental rate, the name registrar takes a part vote rewards inside their domain, and they can issue coins backed by the Steem Power of name owners that can be exchanged with others, in something rather like a stock market. The metric of the growth of the SP vested in the name would contribute to part of the value, as well as subjective, speculative trading for price discovery.
I think it is going to be very interesting to see what comes out of it.