Ok, but you realize that merely listing the words in the acronym does nothing to explain what it actually is. The whole ethereum "ecosystem" is a radical and new construct that very few people are familiar with.
Given that, I would even say that the name "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" is a deliberate, almost satirical, obfuscation.
When you say it's "usually used as a common term", that sounds like wishful thinking. It seems you want to take the term back and distance it from The DAO.
But new efforts like this won't call themselves "a DAO" anymore than a new airship would be called "a hindenburg".
Okay, so let me preface this with a warning. This will be an imprecise analogy! This is just meant to be an aid to understanding. Obviously, there are nuances of the DAO that don't fit perfectly into this model.
Imagine a publicly owned company. It has a CEO, COO, CFO, board, and shareholders. Most decisions are made by the chief officers of the company, and these officers are kept in check by the board of directors. Some shareholders can vote on certain decisions as well if they have the right kind of stock, but for the most part, consensus isn't really needed for most decisions. Day to day operations are handled by the COO, finances are handled by the CFO, and the CEO sort of steers the company as a whole. Most of the time, the board is hand picked to make sure that this centralization of power remains intact. In most companies, shareholders exist primarily to cash in on their own stake in the company either through dividends or by eventually selling their stock. They don't really have to make decisions most of the time, they just provide the capital. The board is there to make sure that their best interests are being catered to basically.
The DAO is almost as if you got rid of management entirely. With the DAO, you have a distributed consensus platform for all shareholders to participate in. Decisions are made democratically through a proposal system ("Should we invest x amount of Ether into y?"), and regulated semi-autonomously by Ethereum contracts. I say semi-autonomously because there is a sort of "board of directors" that takes proposals and filters them out to make sure that a) there aren't too many proposals to be voting on, and b) all the proposals to be voted on are reasonable. You can also split off your stake in the DAO into a smaller DAO if you feel your voice isn't being heard or you don't like the direction the current DAO is going. This is what was attacked the first time IIRC.
There's a whole lot more to it of course, but that's basically how I understand it.
Let's say the members of the DAO voted to make an investment. How does the subject of the investment receive the funds and what mechanism ensures that the DAO actually receives any returns to which it may be entitled to based on the terms of the investment?
> A flexible decentralized autonomous organization leveraging the wisdom of the crowds to benefit the DAO Token Holders [...] The DAO is a for-profit DAO that will diligently use the ETH under its control to create value and provide benefits to its members while collaborating and improving the decentralised ecosystem as a whole.
That's snarky and unnecessary. And your linked site actually doesn't define the term until the third page in, after using "DAO" many times. And even then it's not a definition, it's a sentence that happens to spell it out. I had to ctrl-F to find it.
It's usually used as a common term ("I'm creating a DAO"), but these guys called theirs "The DAO". This attacker exploited "The DAO".