IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 33

understanding of the importance of institutions in
the conduct of human affairs, where an institution is
defined as a conventionally agreed upon, structured
rule-set intended to regulate the behavior of people in
a collective, whether or not they share a common purpose. This understanding, showing how institutions
can provide successful solutions to collective action
problems, is perhaps best exemplified by the work of
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom [1].
Ostrom especially studied institutions for regulating access to some shared common-pool resource
that must be sustained (e.g., water, energy, forestries,
fisheries, etc.), wherein it was in everyone's long-term
collective interest for the resource to endure, but also
in their short-term individual interest to maximize
their "take" from the resource - but this behavior
causes depletion of the resource in the long term. Her
pioneering work showed how self-governing institutions could overcome this "tragedy of the commons,"
deliver successful collective action, and promote sustainability of a common-pool resource. She identified
common features differentiating success stories from
failures, and proposed these as design principles for
enduring institutions (see Appendix).
However, these principles are, perhaps, best
applied to local small-scale situations that involve
physical resources. There is some evidence to suggest
that they do not scale well to deal with global collective action situations (for example, the ineffectiveness
of the Kyoto Protocol for reducing carbon dioxide
emissions). At larger scales, institutions tend to have
multiple, deeply entangled priorities driven by possibly competing or even contradictory policy objectives.
furthermore, in the shift of emphasis from analyzing
the "evolution" of institutions to the generation or
prescription ("supply") of institutions, the principles
were essentially static and did not address dynamical
qualities that could provide the basis of more adaptive
institutions. In addition, the design principles reflect
a pre-World Wide Web era of scholarship and content
creation, and these developments make it difficult to
apply the principles to non-physical shared sources
such as data or knowledge commons.
Similarly, there are some limitations of the design
principles when applied to the design of electronic institutions. for example, Ostrom's definition and analysis of "action situations" overlooked a fundamental
organisational concept called institutionalized power
[2]. Institutionalized power is commonly understood
in legal and organizational theory as denoting when a
designated agent, acting in a specific role in an institutional context, is empowered to create facts of conventional significance by the performance of certain actions
(often, but not necessarily, speech acts). The concept of
institutionalized power is important in electronic institutions for converting the design principles into executable
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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fALL 2014

rules. As another example, in Ostrom's second and
third design principles (congruence of provision and
appropriation rules to the prevailing environment; those
affected by the rules participate in their selection and
formulation), there is an implicit assumption of fairness in the resource allocation. In electronic systems, an
intuitive, subjective, or emotive understanding of fairness cannot be taken for granted: fairness needs to be
computed by some metric - and for this, there are many
different metrics and multiple factors to consider (utility, equity, equality, efficiency, and so on).
We mention these limitations because, currently,
there is a pressing social need for so-called Smart
Cities. These are, undoubtedly, large-scale sociotechnical systems with many interdependent and interconnected institutions, subject to a myriad of dynamic
(and possibly conflicting) policy objectives. It is,
undoubtedly, an ecosystem of intelligent, socio-technical applications, with computational intelligence(s)
participating in decision making with respect to, and
with deep impact on, qualitative human concerns. But
rather than discard Ostrom's theories as inapplicable
due to these perceived limitations, we propose to start
from Ostrom's theories, to overcome the limitations,
and to provide the foundations for promoting awareness, responsiveness, and pro-social incentives.
Therefore, the challenge addressed by the papers in
this special section is: What are the requirements and
opportunities for transforming Ostrom's foundational
work into institutional design principles for an ecosystem of socio-technical systems? In particular, how
can we leverage technology for successful collective
action as advances in sensor networks, widespread
connectivity and social networking, rapid emergence
of cryptocurrencies, and the symbiosis of human and
computational intelligence, produce a social environment that is well beyond anything anticipated in 1990,
when Governing the Commmons was first published?
The articles in this issue attempt to deal with these
very questions. In "Scalable Proactive Event-Driven
Decision-Making," Artikis et al. address the technology that can enhance Ostrom's fourth design principle
(monitoring is by appropriators themselves or by agencies appointed by them). This paper presents a new
logic-based approach for highly efficient event and situation recognition, taking the notion of "monitoring" of
resource management to a different realm of possibilities.
furthermore, it presents an approach for proactive eventdriven computing that eliminates or mitigates anticipated
problems, and capitalizes on forecast opportunities.
The article by Nowak et al., "Social, Psychological and Technological Determinants of Energy Use,"
considers the dynamic socio-psychological processes
involved in the (bottom-up) emergence, (top-down)
supply, and (middle-out) self-adaptation of institutions
as they are manifested through energy commons and
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