After thinking through the fifth iteration and asking for help about being stuck in the weeds, Ricardo reminded me that what we’re trying to do is influence behaviour, more than contributing to understanding it (because I was also inspired by Chan’s article about a cohesive theory of value). I was really stuck with my methodology, and he suggested I look into causal approaches. Things that measure actual behaviour, not just what people say they would do, or like, or believe in.
Through this rabbithole I remembered the curiosity thing again, and Anand Giridharadas’ book, called “The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age”. It’s funny how different things jump out at you at different times. When I went back to my notes, I realised what I kept thinking about is the deep canvassing aspect, around page 316. So off I went into a rabbithole. I’ve been trying to write this straight into the proposal, but my mind bounces around and then I get scared to delete stuff in case I can’t find them again and so I decided to blog about it, in my own style, and then at least it can live here. So this is not a new iteration of the project, let’s call it version 5.1 instead. It turned into a bit of a mess.
A big contributor to the reckless spawning of open tabs is that it was hard to get actual academic articles about deep canvassing. Once I found DeepCanvass with this helpful short summary and the original article, things improved.
Deep canvassing is a one-to-one conversation methodology that has been scientifically proven to be able to do two vital things:
- Create lasting changes in how (or whether) people vote by shifting the underlying emotions and attitudes that determine our political views
- Generate new trust and connection across difference or disagreement.
The Commons, Social Change Library, had a section “Deep Canvassing to Counter Disinformation” which include examples of scripts to use.
Eventually, I found the original article referred in the book, by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, published in 2016 “Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing“
Joshua Kalla
One of the authors of that article, Joshua Kalla, is a gold mine. Recent articles focused on active listening (ala Carol Gilligan 2021 and Staddon et al 2023) and cross-cutting media. There’s also a study on narrative strategies that link, to me, with the game design, and could help with my actual methodology too.
Why care about feelings when we’re talking about scientific facts?
The thing is, these things are all about politics. I feel like it’s about changing people’s minds about what you, the canvasser believe is right, but it’s not really about what is factually true. According to my AI, science aims to discover and understand objective truths through systematic inquiry and empirical evidence, whereas politics involves subjective decision-making, negotiation, and power dynamics, often driven by competing interests and values.
So we can’t just copy paste deep canvassing and the related things, into scientific issues. I haven’t found a lot about deep canvassing applied to science. The Yale program on Climate Change Communication had a case study from 2021 about “Changing minds on climate action through listening. Deep Canvassing Increases Support for Climate Change Action in Rural British Columbia.”
Deep canvassing in science??
Deep canvassing in scientific contexts can be challenging because scientific issues often involve complex information, technical jargon, and nuanced debates, making it harder to distill key points into accessible, persuasive conversations. Additionally, people may be less motivated to engage with scientific issues that don’t seem directly relevant to their daily lives, unlike political issues that might have more obvious personal implications.
This then reminded me of Eyal and Stampnitzky, about the transformation of expertise. Eyal talks about politically charged scientific questions, the politicization of science and loss of trust in scientific institutions. While they both explain that expertise is a social construct, Stampnitzky counters that is not a crisis of expertise, but a transformation. So I don’t want to do “advocacy” or “persuade” people because, actually, I no longer know what we want to advocate or persuade for. I’m happy to hear from other people and get super local. I just want people to get curious. Like, whatever we do, needs to be well informed, and held accountable.
This also links to my interest in volunteer organisations. If you can’t force people to participate, you need to provide a pull, you need to understand incentives. To get people to stay, you need to understand the feelings.
Peter Walsh, via Henry Jenkins, had a blog about “That Withered Paradigm: The Web, the Expert, and the Information Hegemony”. I think this is also more than 20 years old, but I want to read it, see if there’s been recent comments on this.
Why digital?
I see three reasons why incorporating the digital aspect is critical for this project to have any chance of moving the needle. The first is exactly because of the complex information, jargon and required nuance. The digital realm, and games, really, has the potential to play with this, and meet people where they are to unpack this over time – this is my interest in the metaverse.
Secondly, the rising importance of digital technologies in everyday communication has played a key role in processes of political polarization and rising mistrust and intolerance (Goldfarb & Dishon 2024). To me, it is important to offer different means of engaging digitally, that is more fun. This reminds me of The Eternal Network: The ends and becomings of network culture, edited by Kristoffer Gansing and Inga Luchs, 2020. This then starts linking with the metagaming, and convergence culture aspects.
Thirdly, we have a lot of ground to cover. Deep canvassing requires trained facilitators meeting people one on one. This is the best way, sure, but with billions of people to be activated, we need help. I think the digital cannot do it all, but it can create a curious hunger, it can be the hook. I want a little community in a forgotten place where no one cares to have the potential to work together better, and then connect to others across the globe to do stuff. And I want them to be hooked by such playfulness that the word spreads by itself.
Why bottom-up?
I’m struggling to put into nice sounding academic words why I feel this is important. “The powers don’t be don’t care” and “we’re captured by neoliberal capitalist swine and we need a revolution” doesn’t make for a good proposal. One quote I keep coming back to is by Craig Fugate, ex FEMA, USA in a Netflix doccie, where he said “Government-centric problem-solving is going to fail miserably in these large events. The more we can have neighbours helping neighbours, the better we can focus the limited government resources on the areas that have the greatest need.” I like that because it doesn’t negate the need for government, or make the powerful people the bad guys. So I want to say something like that, with an academic reference. My AI says: We need bottom-up approaches for global change because top-down solutions often fail to account for local contexts and community-specific needs. By empowering individuals and communities to drive change from the ground up, we can create more inclusive, participatory, and sustainable solutions that actually stick. And then I think the digital is the component that could allow those local context to scale globally, but I also acknowledge this hasn’t worked so well; people just design another app to collate all apps. Anyway. My AI also says Elinor Ostrom is a good reference and I recall seeing something current that revisited that. It may be about the social-ecological systems (SESs) framework.
There’s probably a lot on why participatory culture is important, because it’s all the rage in urban planning, but it still feels very … stratified, to me. Like not reeeallly letting everyday people in, or setting the terms way too much. I was going to just suck it up, but Chan’s levers article made it possible to talk about this in terms of transformation. So it’s just the level of focus that is the challenge.
A book “Community Development for Times of Crisis” – Creating Caring Communities, Edited by Mark A. Brennan, Rhonda Phillips, Norman Walzer and Brent D. Hales.
O’Brien et al’s 2023 article “Fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability” inspires me and has nice graphs, but somehow isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. I like the idea of small things that can scale in a fractal way, and they also talk about relational values, that Chan focused on. I think this group, based in Oslo, Norway, could make for nice future collaborators in a Nordic project. Anyway, focus.
“Knowledge Alliances for Global Change Adaptation: A Relational Approach Based on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Territorial Management, and Community Practices in the Chilean Context” (2025) has the STS vibe, ala Turnhout or Green. I am cautious of the “twee hippie hubris” – aka, the lack of accountability, or the naive assertion that indigenous is best or whatever.
So, then, my current thinking is that:
this project aims to develop a digitally-assisted methodology that can contribute to teaching the scientific method (?), but in a context of care: helping us manage (?) the underlying emotions and attitudes that shape us.
Methodology
Thinking about methodology, what do I want to achieve? What do I want to measure? I want to change how people behave in volunteer groups. I want people to be less stuck up their own arses, and reflect, and think a bit more. I don’t necessarily want people to care about others more (the road to hell being paved with good intentions and all that), I want them to understand themselves better. This worked for me, and I want to spread the love. Games for Seva called that metacognition. There’s a bit of literature on it – thinking about how you think. Testing this, measuring this, is then the next challenge. Psychology research seems to be the place to go look for that then.
websearch (Causal approaches in digitally mediated psychotherapy)
More Light? Opportunities and Pitfalls in Digitalized Psychotherapy Process Research
Digitally mediated psychotherapy: Intimacy, distance, and connection in virtual therapeutic spaces
I was wondering if community management systems in game design could help, but i think that is too involved for this project. Some links and search results though for future reference:
Wordle – a simple little game that explored. demographics – then there is geographic alternatives:
On creativity, Rachel Gould (of the Chan clan) wrote “How creativity can help research on the multiple values of nature become more innovative and inclusive” may be useful.
Other stuff
Sometimes I ask my AI stuff in the hope of getting a hit that I won’t think to look for otherwise. In a prompt asking if deep canvassing has been applied to environmental behaviour change, Matthew Feinberg was suggested. The article that drew my eye is called “Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior.” (As a South African I am finding it really hard to read awe as in awesome. I keep reading it as awê, which is a greeting, an affirmation, and an exclamation. But I also keep reading causal approaches as casual approaches, so, hey. Much curious. Much playful. Anyway.) One of the cited by articles was about nature being less boring than concrete, or something.
TODO:
I’m leaving some links here in a feeble attempt to clean up my tabs. You should know, apart from the blogposts, I also have a google doc, a hedgedoc, an Obsidian vault and a physical notebook as well. Focus is hard, ok.
Social Cohesion and Volunteering: Correlates, Causes, and Challenges (2024)
The convergence culture wiki had a criticism “Rethinking Convergence Culture” (2011), which is welcomed as an update. The citations are more useful, mainly being more recent. e.g. Interfacing as embodied practice: journeys between print, screen and beyond. (2024) and Digital cultural policy. The story of a slow and reluctant revolution (2022). I find this field hard because the majority of articles complain and analyse how broken everything is, and the rest talk about an unattainable utopia. I don’t see a lot of realistic options.
Henry Jenkins on what we can learn from Wikipedia (2007) “What wikipedia can teach us about the new media literacies (part two)”
Shout out again to Mitsea et al and their metaskills work e.g. “A Systematic Review of Serious Games in the Era of Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies, the Metaverse, and Neurotechnologies: Transformation Through Meta-Skills Training” (2025). Two articles that cited that seem relevant:
A Serious Game to Promote Water–Energy–Land–Food–People (WELFP) Nexus Perception and Encourage Pro-Environmental and Pro-Social Urban Agriculture and Using Minecraft to Develop Citizenship Competencies by Designing a Smart City.
From the Chan stable, may be useful for methodology unpacking “Use of theories of human action in recent conservation research”
The term “transformative capacities” which may make it into the project title (e.g. What we play is life: Using a game thinking lens to strengthen transformative capacities in interdisciplinary contributor groups., or
Development of a digitally mediated “deep canvassing” method through a game design lens to strengthen transformative capacities in interdisciplinary contributor groups.) comes from articles co-authored by Warren Nilsson. Warren was introduced to me by Helene Smit, who also introduced me to depth work. I stumbled across them again, after more than a decade, when I realised the title for the TEDx event where they both spoke would work well for this project – “What we play is life”. How cool is that.
A reference I took from the AquaSavvy project, but ended up not using. “Theories of power and social change. Power contestations and their implications for research on social change and innovation”. I’m including it here to remind myself, I am not focusing on power in this project, because I want to focus on the low-level contributions. The equivalents of a OpenStreetMap edit, or a Wiki edit. Learning and reflecting. If there are power struggles involved, it is inside ourselves.
“Advancing the understanding of social innovation in sustainability transitions: exploring processes, politics, and policies for accelerating transitions” looks interesting but maybe not quite relevant.
Nice article to link to the metagaming aspect “Supporting learning in synchronous collaborative game design in virtual worlds: A synergy between technological and pedagogical considerations“. They talk about four essential considerations in supporting collaborative design in virtual learning environments: social artifacts, togetherness, synchronicity, and multilevel participation.
Recent metaverse article Kim shared: “Social Opportunities, Learning Practices, and Performance in Metaverse and Virtual World: A Comparative Scoping Review in Higher Education” it looks like they say that we need better experimental designs. ha. “Theories and strategies lack alignment in designing social learning activities”
Talking about how the metagaming aspect can become the game itself, “When paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text” (2017) – the cited by on this article is a gold mine waiting to be explored.
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