Student Assistant
Burak Arda Okutan is a master’s student in computer science at the Technical University of Berlin and conducts research on governance structures, participation, and incentive mechanisms in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). At the Weizenbaum Institute, he works on issues of digital democracy and political decision-making in the digital world and blockchain-based systems.
Together with Prof. Dr. Stefan Schmid, he has conducted a large-scale empirical research project on DAO governance. The central publication, “Democracy for DAOs,” compares governance metrics such as participation rates, voting dynamics, and decision-making times with Ethereum-based DAOs and was awarded the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICBC 2025. His research focuses on liquid democracy, platform governance, data-driven analysis, and the modeling of incentive systems.
Contact
arda.okutan[at]weizenbaum-institut.de
The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society – The German Internet Institute