Abstract Whether We Recognize It Or Not

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Abstract: The Internet is full of revolutionary and original institutional forms that change the way we organize social life online and offline regardless of whether we are aware of it. Software engineers have had to face challenges in managing governance issues on these platforms and other institutions. A lot of them have not had exposure to relevant historical events or theories of institutional design. We present a useful framework designed to stimulate dialogue between computer scientists as well as political scientists. The most prevalent guiding principles for the design of digital institutions to date in computer-supported cooperative work and the tech industry at large have been an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm, a set of theories of the mind, like A/B-testing, as well as incremental software engineering that is based on issues. One of the institutional analysis frameworks that has proven useful in the design of traditional institutions is the body of resource governance literature known as the "Ostrom Workshop". One of the key conclusions of this literature which is yet to be widely integrated into the design of many new institutions, is the importance of including participatory process mechanisms in what is referred to as the "constitutional" layer of institutional design. MINECRAFT This is essentially defining rules that allow for and facilitate diverse stakeholder participation in institutional design changes. We explore to what extent this requirement is met or could be better fulfilled in three different instances of digital institutions: cryptocurrencies cannabis informatics, and amateur Minecraft server governance. Analyzing these diverse cases allows us to illustrate the broad relevance of constitutional layers across a variety of kinds of digital institutions.