Burak Arda Okutan

About

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 and analyzed over 3,000 proposals from 14 SNS DAOs. The central publication, “Democracy for DAOs,” compares governance metrics such as participation rates, voting dynamics, and decision 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.

In addition to his research, he is committed to transparent, fair, and scalable digital decision-making processes and works interdisciplinarily at the intersection of computer science, politics, and governance. With his experience in web development, data engineering, and blockchain analysis, he brings technical and analytical skills to the research group.

Research Group: Digital Economy, Internet Ecosystem, and Internet Policy