Hello!

We hope you are doing well. We've been working diligently on several fronts to strengthen our projects and expand our community over the last quarter. We're excited to share the highlights here.

Product Updates

Both Viral Spiral and Uli are undergoing continuous iterative improvements

Viral Spiral hosts biweekly playtest sessions to introduce the game to new audiences and get their feedback. Sign up here for a chance to try the game out with the Tattle team.

Uli's slur crowdsourcing feature are being externally tested in partnership with Point of View and Nazariya. We've also been doing sessions with Feminism in India, and Chambal Media Private Limited (Khabar Lahariya) to understand how the browser plugin could help their flows better. You can see the latest Uli newsletter update here.

Our in classroom game about image manipulation for Factshala Innovation Lab is taking shape and readying a public release.

Last year we worked with GitHub to understand how they could release data from public activity for international development, public policy and economics research. The work was formally released in September through, the GitHub Innovation Graph. You can read more about the release, and a white paper based on Tattle's report on the GitHub blog.

Also, Feluda has been recognised as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, an UN-affiliated consortium.

Tattle´s Threads

In keeping with our tradition, we've continued to share our insights through long tweet threads. Some notable ones from the quarter are:

Exploring Meta's Hidden Words Feature: Meta has made it easy for people to add lists of words to mute in a user's comment section. We made a nifty webpage that lets you add our uli slur list featuring hinglish, tamil and hindi slurs to Instagram. Read our write up on the tool here.

Factshala Project Reading List: Continuing the tradition of sharing our reading lists for a project, we have published one for our Factshala Project. There's more writing about our research on working on this in-classroom game here.

Talks and Publications

Alongside our regular blogging, Tattle and our work has been represented at different forums -

• Study Published in Misinfo Review: Our joint work with Monk Prayogshala on incentives for sharing accurate content was published in Misinfo Review. This research was funded by the Interledger Foundation.

• Accessing Democracy 2023: Denny spoke at FLAME University about his current focus - Technological Interventions against Online Harms. He talked about Feluda and advocated that as online platforms are increasingly closing API access, civic action in the form of data crowdsourcing is needed to effectively study and respond to misinformation.

• Open-source AI - A Nebulous Concept Bearing a Heavy Weight: In this article, the associations between and current understandings of terms like öpen-source AI, scraping and some problematic use-bases of AI are explained. It relays that defining the responsibility/liability of AI is far too complex an issue for one unified framework.

• To Think of Interdisciplinarity as Intercurrence: The paper borrows the concept of intercurrence from Orren & Skowronek (1996) and reorients it to explicate the practice of interdisciplinary research by reflecting on the working of an interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers and activists from the field of computer science and social sciences involved in developing.

• Keynote on Civic Tech and Alternative Visions of Tech: Tarunima delivered a keynote address at the annual symposium organized by the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making and Society. Her talk explored the promise but also challenges for alternative visions for tech.

• CCG Tech Podcast: In this episode, Nidhi and Shashank from the CCG team speak to Tarunima about the misinformation ecosystem in India. They discuss what misinformation is, the depth of the problem in India, how it spreads over channels like WhatsApp, and how we can guard against misinformation as we consume content online.

• Tattle's Blog Enhancement: We've taken steps to better organize the wealth of information on our blog. With thematic labels, we're making it easier for you to access and explore the insightful content we've been curating including our Twitter threads which end up getting published on our blog as well. You can now keep up with our blog updates through RSS. Old school has its place :-).

In the last quarter of 2023, we're focusing on releasing 'Facts', scaling Viral Spiral, and releasing the feature to crowdsource data through Uli. We're glad to have Aatman, Siddharth, and Kaustubha join the Tattle family in this phase of intense work. Aatman has joined as a full-stack developer and is supporting Viral Spiral and Uli. Siddharth is working on data governance frameworks for the Uli data. Kaustubha is a volunteer helping build the developer community for Uli.

That is a wrap on this edition of the newsletter. Take care and have a fantastic and festive end to the year!

Regards,
Yash.