Hello,

We hope you find yourself in good spirits as we enter the last quarter of 2022! This is, after all, one of the most festive periods in India.

In our last newsletter from May of this year, we described the three new projects we were undertaking in 2022. These were in addition to Uli - a browser plugin to respond to online gender-based violence, that we had started in 2021.

We are delighted to announce that Uli had its public launch in July. Uli has its own microsite where you can find a link to install and try out the plugin.

We're also nearing the end of the other three projects:

• Viral Spiral: This is an adaptive digital card game that puts players in the role of 'playing' in a social media network where people try to win by having the most clout. It provides a safe model to understand social media's influence on citizens. The game is set to be released by end of this year but the game design team has started publishing blogs to describe the process.

• Study on Incentives for Sharing Accurate Information in partnership with Monk Prayogshala: We managed to recruit 900+ participants for the study and have concluded the experiment phase. The Monk Team is now in the process of analyzing the data and publishing the results.

• We finished the first phase of our work with GitHub on releasing standardized metrics for international development, public policy and economics research. Following interviews and focus group discussions, we have submitted a report to GitHub for their consideration.

What is next?

For us, the success of Viral Spiral and Uli is partly defined by the number of people who find them helpful or illuminating.

Communications and marketing has always been Tattle's shortcoming but we owe it to all the people who have worked hard on these projects to do a good job at spreading the word about them.

So, for this last quarter, our emphasis is on outreach about the ongoing projects.

We are conducting workshops with gender rights organizations and presenting at events to popularize Uli. This will also help us understand if the tool serves the goals of making the online social media experience less fatiguing for people of marginalized genders in India.

On October 5th we demoed the tool at APC's regional convening on Challenging hate narratives.

If you know groups or individuals that could benefit from using Uli, please let us know.

We are also eager for collaborations to grow this tool to more languages, platforms and media modalities.

If you would like to partner, please send an email to uli_support@tattle.co.in.

Open Calls

Since March of this year, we have been holding open calls once a month.

The open calls are in part a transparency activity, and in part a team-building activity.

The Tattle open calls are a way for people to know what other team members are working on. But, we also invite external speakers, who have worked on aligned projects, to discuss their work.

It helps us reflect on our work and explore collaborations.

One of the most engaging open calls was with Lubhyathi Rangarajan who spoke about the Sedition Database.

While these calls are open in that anyone can join them, we don't record them. We believe this allows for a more free-flowing discussion.

You can learn about the upcoming open calls through our Twitter handle and/or Slack channel.

What the team has been reading:

The Tattle team has eclectic interests but many of us like to read and write. So, Tattle now has a book club!

• In July, we discussed Snigdha Poonam's Dreamers. This book is interesting as a thesis on the current political climate in India and its linkages with the changing aspirations of the young in the country. But the last chapter on 'scams' spoke quite directly to what we have been seeing in our research on different platforms in India.

• This week we discussed the first three chapters of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (open access). The book led to an interesting conversation on whether Tattle's work aligned with the principles laid out in the book, but also to what extent these were principles that we could aspire to.

The Tattle team is gearing for its second in-person session in Delhi this week.

If any of you are around Delhi NCR between the 10th and 15th of October, please hit us up. We would love to meet!

Best,
Tarunima

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PS: Tattle set up a GitHub sponsor's page earlier this year.

Financing open source projects is a big challenge and we figured it is good to be a part of the experiment to solve it.

There is something extremely rewarding and humbling about people discovering your work on the Internet and unconditionally supporting a project with a contribution.

We did a little (virtual) song and dance at Tattle when we got our first sponsor.

To our sponsor(s), thank you! Your trust matters more than you realize.