ODI Research Fellow Sylvia Cazacu-Bucica studied "Datopolis", a role-playing board game designed to help organisational stakeholders navigate data infrastructure development, revealing how specific play strategies and facilitation approaches drive critical reflection to help resolve socio-technical frictions in shared data practices.
This article was written by ODI fellow Sylvia Cazacu-Bucica, and was originally published on the ODI’s Canvas blog. The introduction has been reposted here, with the full blog and research paper linked below.
Data rarely delivers public value on its own; it needs the arteries and rule-sets we call data infrastructure to facilitate its creation, sharing and use. Because that infrastructure sits largely out of sight, the people who build or use it often encounter invisible and unexpected friction, both inside teams and across entire organisations. In these organisations, decision-makers often neither understand the necessity of the infrastructure nor the importance of its upkeep. To surface those dynamics in a gamified setting, the Open Data Institute created Datopolis, a collaborative board game in which players design a miniature data infrastructure, learning how to develop and maintain new apps and services with different types of data while playing with each other.
After eight years of game sessions in more than twenty organisations across eight countries, we decided to look back and evaluate: How does Datopolis actually shape the way players think about data infrastructure? We conducted a qualitative study based on retrospective interviews with 22 participants, both facilitators and players, which reveals that the game prompts critical reflection through:
- Three facilitation techniques: guided debriefs, mid-game scenario pivots, and map-it-to-real-life discussions that anchor play in everyday practice.
- Three recurring play strategies: coalition-building, tactical patching, and bold redesigns – each mirroring the organisational dilemmas participants face at work.
With the two features above, a two-hour Datopolis session can act as a low-risk rehearsal for the high-stakes decisions that keep real-world data infrastructure running. In this article we explore how insights from these sessions translate into better data strategy and governance.
