2026-10-28 –, Naturalis 02
Do you enjoy immersive games? Do you struggle getting your colleagues excited about PIDs or platform governance? Wouldn’t it be neat if there was an immersive game designed to explore community decision-making and research infrastructure? Believe it or not, this is work in progress with the Open Game Data commons, an open infrastructure for learning game research, developed by Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin.
Come prepared to share your experiences and contribute your ideas in this heads- and hands-on game co-design workshop. You’ll get to practice participatory consent processes and explore the use of facilitated rounds to surface and prioritize game design features. Bring your PID passion, bring your visionary imagination, bring your heads and hands. We’ll bring the post-its and markers.
One of the challenges with persistent identifier work is communicating the possibilities, the “what if” scenarios. How to illustrate what and how things would be different and better with PIDs, the variety of use cases, the immediate user experience, the impact on the research ecosystem. Policy papers and infographics are not enough. Where we see real change is where people are experiencing the impact first hand.
The same is true with governance work. While people acknowledge the importance of community governance for sustainable commons, most have no direct experience with participatory decision-making at home or at work. And many actively avoid governance work thinking it at best yawningly boring or at worst terrifyingly strict.
So, given these blockages, what can we PID practitioners do to foster community commons? How can we move beyond words to build capacity and inspire action? Here is where learning science and open infrastructure come together to make something beautiful: interactive immersive online games.
In this workshop, you are invited to bring your head and your hands to a co-design experience. The goal is to develop story lines for an immersive online game about building the commons, in which the players explore community governance. Game data sets are continuous, researchers study subsets, how can we integrate PIDs? How do we ensure community governance of data schema? Who decides the sustainability model for the commons?
You’ll get to practice participatory consent processes, experience shared power in group work, and explore the use of facilitated rounds to surface and prioritize game design features. Why is PID work a game changer? Who does the change matter to? What use case(s) should the game focus on? What are the player avatars? What do the players struggle with? What are the story line outcomes? What are the key learning objectives?
Bring your PID passion, bring your visionary imagination, bring your heads and hands. We’ll bring the post-its and markers.
Laurel (Laure) Haak (she/they) inordinately enjoys commons governance, particularly for its potential in integrating democratic participation throughout research and education. She currently serves as a scientist in the Field Day Lab at the University of Wisconsin, supporting efforts to spin out Open Game Data as a community-governed and -sustained research infrastructure. Laure brings experience in entrepreneurship, open science, infrastructure, governance, community engagement, and research policy from work at VeriMe Cooperative, Mighty Red Barn, ORCID, Discovery Logic/Thomson Reuters, US National Academies, and Science Magazine, as well as service on nonprofit boards including Phoenix Bioinformatics. Laure is a AAAS Fellow and has a PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University Medical School and did postdoctoral research at the US National Institutes of Health.