While hosted and led by Tattle Civic Tech, the evolution of Uli over the last 3 years has been a collective journey. The pilot stage was supported by the Digital Society Challenge grant provided to the Centre for Internet and Society. We have also been supported by GitHub’s DPG Open Source Community Manager Program. Most recently, we were supported by Mozilla Foundation’s 2023 Data Future’s Lab Cohort. We’ve also had amazing partners at every stage who have given their time, energy and wisdom to weave this journey with us. From the many organisations who joined the initial brainstorms, to the research and feminist collaborators, the annotators, and the many individual volunteers who have enriched the open-source experience. In 2023, we partnered with Chambal Media Private Limited (Khabar Lahariya); Point of View; Nazariya: Queer Feminist Resource Group; and Feminism in India (FII) to build on our crowdsourced slur list and are now conducting synchronous sessions to include their annotations on the slur words in the list.

In 2024, we see this collaborative approach continuing into Uli’s next phase. Uli will be focussing on turning the redaction process into a learning tool. We often get the question, why was that word redacted? We’ll be working on a pop-up that shows why the redacted word is problematic. Additionally, the Uli team will be building a slur list of abuse particularly against politicians of marginalised genders.

If you are interested in collaborating with us on the research or technical sides of Uli development, do reach out to us here.

Let’s keep chiselling away at the problem of online gender-based violence together!