Abstract: It Doesn't Matter Whether We Recognize It Or Not

Abstract: The Internet is full of revolutionary and original institutional structures that have transformed social interaction online and offline regardless of whether we are aware of it. Governance issues on these Internet platforms and other digital institutions have posed an issue for software engineers, a majority of whom have little exposure to the relevant history or theory of institutional design. We present a useful framework designed to stimulate dialogue between computer scientists and political scientists. The most prevalent guiding principles for the design of digital institutions to date in computer-supported cooperative work and the entire tech industry have been an incentive-driven behavioral engineering paradigm, which is a collection of atheoretical approaches such as A/B-testing, and incremental software engineering that is based on issues. One of the institutional analysis frameworks that has proved useful in the design of traditional institutions is the resource governance literature known as the "Ostrom Workshop". the only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent of the major findings of this literature that has yet to be widely integrated into the design of numerous new institutions is the necessity of incorporating participatory processes in what is known as a "constitutional" layer of institutional design. This is essentially defining rules that allow for and facilitate the participation of diverse stakeholder groups in institutional design changes. We examine whether this principle is being fulfilled or could be better fulfilled in three different instances of digital institutions: cryptocurrency, cannabis informatics and amateur Minecraft server governance. We can illustrate the significance of constitutional layers in a variety of kinds of digital institutions by examining such diverse cases.