  Whether we recognize it or not, the Internet is rife with exciting and
original institutional forms that are transforming social organization on and
offline. Issues of governance in these Internet platforms and other digital
institutions have posed a challenge for software engineers, many of whom have
little exposure to the relevant history or theory of institutional design.
Here, we offer one useful framework with an aim to stimulate dialogue between
computer scientists and political scientists. The dominant guiding practices
for the design of digital institutions to date in human-computer interaction,
computer-supported cooperative work, and the tech industry at large have been
an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm, a collection of
atheoretical approaches such as A/B-testing, and incremental issue-driven
software engineering. One institutional analysis framework that has been useful
in the design of traditional institutions is the body of resource governance
literature known as the "Ostrom Workshop". A key finding of this literature
that has yet to be broadly incorporated in the design of many digital
institutions is the importance of including participatory change process
mechanisms in what is called a "constitutional layer" of institutional
design---in other words, defining rules that allow and facilitate diverse
stakeholder participation in the ongoing process of institutional design
change. We explore to what extent this consideration is met or could be better
met in three varied cases of digital institutions: cryptocurrencies, cannabis
informatics, and amateur Minecraft server governance. Examining such highly
varied cases allows us to demonstrate the broad relevance of constitutional
layers in many different types of digital institutions.
