Abstract: Whether We Are Acquainted With It Or Not

Abstract The Internet is full of innovative and original forms of institutionalization that transform social organization online and offline regardless of whether we are aware of it. Issues of governance in these Internet platforms and other digital institutions have posed an issue for software engineers, many of whom are not exposed to the theorems or theories of design for institutions. Gaming provides a useful framework designed to promote dialogue between computer scientists and political scientists. The dominant guiding practices for the design of digital institutions in human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and the tech industry at large have been an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm, which is a collection of atheoretical approaches like A/B-testing, as well as incremental issue-driven software engineering. The "Ostrom Workshop" resource governance literature has proved to be a useful tool for the design of traditional institutions. A key finding of this literature that is yet to be widely incorporated into the design of numerous digital institutions is the necessity of incorporating mechanisms for participation in what is called a "constitutional layer" of design for institutions. In other words, rules that allow and facilitate diversifying stakeholder participation in continuous process of designing institutional change. We investigate whether this principle is being met or could be better met in three varied cases of digital institutions: cryptocurrency, cannabis informatics and amateur Minecraft server governance. We can illustrate the significance of constitutional layers in various types of digital institutions by looking at these diverse scenarios.