“Open source is a philosophy and a movement, and what makes open source thrive is the community that grows up around it.” says Abby Kerns in The Newstack. Community has no physical or geographical definition but rather is defined by a shared attitude, interest and goal and spans  geography, religion and political affiliations. Stories are the soul of open-source platforms, which prompt children to rapid fluency in their mother tongue, before they can read simple sentences in English. 

Illustration by Huynh Thi Kim Lien for 'Don't Wake the Baby!' 

Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver and Room to Read are partnering to combine the power of open, community and stories so that children can read over 400 storybooks in English, Bengali, Chinyanja, Chitonga, Hindi, Khmer, Lao, Marathi, Nepali, Sepedi, Sinhala, SiSwati, Kiswahili, Tamil, and Vietnamese. “Room to Read and Pratham Books share a common commitment to providing underserved children with high quality storybooks. We are delighted to have Room to Read’s books on our digital platform, StoryWeaver,  which are now available under open licences, so that children everywhere can discover the joy of reading”, says Suzanne Singh, Chairperson Pratham Books.

Room to Read is a non-profit organization that seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in low-income countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Founded on the belief that “world change starts with educated children," the organization focuses on working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments to develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children. 

They have partnered with StoryWeaver to publish 200 of their original language titles and their English versions on the StoryWeaver platform under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. The StoryWeaver team has worked closely with Room to Read on editing these titles for publishing in Engalish, doing image enhancements and migrating the books to the platform. Alisha Berger, Global Publisher at Room to Read says “We are thrilled to partner with Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver to bring our books into the digital space for the first time. We hope these 400 openly-licensed books will inspire, motivate, and share the joy of reading with the wide and engaged audience on Storyweaver, as well as showcase Room to Read’s 20-year commitment to making exciting and fun books for children in their local languages.” 

Having these storybooks under the CC BY license on StoryWeaver takes these Room to Read stories to a larger audience, worldwide. At the same time, it gives the StoryWeaver community new stories to read and translate, thereby giving children around the world access to more stories in their mother tongue. Many of these stories have already been versioned into other languages like Punjabi, Filipino, Malayalam, French, Italian and others. Here’s hoping the stories continue to grow so as to put a book in every child’s hand. 

If you would like to partner with us please write to [email protected] 

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written by Anamika Radhakrishnan, Arpit Arora, Pallavi Krishnan

The StoryWeaver team has been attending a number of conferences in the last few months. Here’s a look at the highlights from some of them. 

DataKind Bangalore, DataLearn "Data Matters" (Nov, 2018)
Pratham Books was invited to talk about the advantages of a data-driven approach in developing the StoryWeaver platform and showcase the project with DataKind Bangalore to develop a NLP prototype to auto-tag stories with relevant keywords and themes to enhance content discoverability.

Arpit Arora from StoryWeaver was also a panelist at the event talking about the importance of data-driven strategies at social organisations and how other organisations and volunteers emulate this approach.

International Conference on Technology for Education 2018 (Dec, 2018)
Pratham Books was recently part of the International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E 2018) held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. This was the ninth in a series of annual events held with the objective to bring together all colleagues interested in promoting learning and teaching through the use of information and communication technology (ICT). 

Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team talked about “Leveraging technology, collaboration and open content to address the global book drought for children”. The 20 minute presentation was followed by an extremely interesting Q&A on  how AI can help address many of the challenges faced by the StoryWeaver platform

Microsoft Academic Research Summit, IIT Madras (Jan, 2019)
Purvi Shah, Digital Head, StoryWeaver was was invited by Microsoft Research to talk on the topic of AI for Societal Impact and how StoryWeaver plans to leverage AI to move towards its mission of ‘A book in every child’s hand’. The summit was a forum to foster meaningful discussion and discussion among the Indian Computer Science research community and enable collaborations to advance the state of the art and raise the bar on research efforts. The theme for this years summit was Data Science and AI.

This comes shortly after the commencement of our partnership with Microsoft Research to develop Parallel Corpuses for improving the efficacy of crowd sourced Indic language translations.

AXLE 2019 (Jan 2019)
Pratham Books was invited to be part of a panel discussion at AXLE 2019 held by Microsoft Academia Accelerator at Bengaluru. The panel discussion titled Building and Using Technology for Underserved Languages included discussions around how English is currently the aspirational language. Anamika Radhakrishnan from the StoryWeaver team says “It was extremely gratifying to know that preserving our mother tongue languages is given a high priority across sectors including the mainstream technology companies such as Microsoft”

Bodh: EdTech roundtable for social impact: Tata Communications (Feb, 2019)
Under the aegis of Kreeda aur Shiksha, a Tata Communications - VVMVP Initiative, BODH: A Roundtable on EdTech for Social Impact was held in Bengaluru. The idea of the BODH roundtable is to create a space for informed conversations on EdTech and bring together innovators and practitioners who are transforming learning in formal and non-formal spaces using ICTs and new media. There were over 28 speakers who contributed to the roundtable.

Pratham Books was asked to participate in a panel discussion at the session on Creating Impact Using Digital Media on the topic of Bridging the Gaps with Technology. Pallavi Krishnan from the StoryWeaver team was part of the panel discussion along with Smriti Reha from Anaadi Foundation and Vatsala Shrivastava from Social Alpha and was chaired by Supriya Singh from Tata Communications. The session focused on how practices from diverse fields have successfully channelized the potential of digital and new media to create social impact.

 

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Pratham Books (www.prathambooks.org) is a not-for-profit children's book publisher that was set up in 2004 to publish good quality, affordable books in many Indian languages. Our mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and we have spread the joy of reading to millions of children in India. As a publisher serving every child in India, Pratham Books has always pushed the boundaries when it comes to exploring innovative ways in which to create access to joyful stories and have been fortunate in finding partners to collaborate with who share this vision.

In 2015, Pratham Books' increased its footprint by going digital. As an industry leader, we were one of the first publishers in the country to open license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts stories in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The stories can be read, translated, versioned or downloaded for free. All stories on the platform are openly licensed.

We are looking for a Content Manager for the StoryWeaver team.

 

Illustration by Mohith Mohan from Building a Building, written by Kavitha Punniyamurthi, published by Pratham Books

We are looking for a dynamic individual for the position of Content Manager - StoryWeaver. A self-motivated individual with experience and skills in curating content from multiple sources, forging strategic partnerships and anchoring the process of migrating content to the platform. The person will lead a team and be responsible for timely execution to expand the content available on the platform to serve the needs of children globally. The role will report to the Director - StoryWeaver and will work closely with different internal and external stakeholders. This is a full time position based out of Bengaluru.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the strategic planning, development, and management of content on StoryWeaver

• Curation of Content

  • Continual development of new, innovative ideas to curate the content on the platform 

  • Curate content based on requirements of organisations and partners so as to ensure users access quality content

• Licensing and Sourcing Content

  • Create partnership opportunities with other publishers to open license their content on the platform

  • Work closely with the content team for sourcing children's storybooks under open licences from across the globe

  • Create, implement and showcase the best practices around open licensing of content through easily replicable frameworks

• Orienting to Curriculum 

  • Liaison with educational and governmental partners and teachers on curating content based on curriculum and structured frameworks. 

  • Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders and subject matter experts to create and source curriculum based content. 

• Hygiene and Maintenance

  • Liaison with collaborators and  internal and external stakeholder to ensure that high quality standards are met for crowd-sourced content - including review processes and red flagging of inappropriate content

  • Work closely with operations and studio teams to ensure processes and work-flows are created and well implemented

  • Work closely with the editorial, research and marketing teams on promotions and campaigns and to deliver the project goals

• Other Tasks 

  • To take on other tasks or responsibilities, as required for the project  

  • Archiving and documentation 

Required Skills

1. Post graduate in Literature / Education / Journalism with 6-8 years of experience in related fields. Experience with digital platforms is favourable

2. Experience in curriculum development or classroom experience

3. The candidate must have hands-on experience in review, proofreading and production related processes.

4. Exceptional communication skills     

5. Highly organized and detail oriented

6. A proven track record to manage, lead and deliver large-scale operations

7. Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team         

Nice to have but not mandatory

1. Experience working with non-profits     

2. 1-2 years working in a partner-facing role     

3. Indic language and digital publishing experience

Location: 

This is a full-time position in our Bangalore office.

Compensation:

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience

Write to us:

Email your resume with ‘Content Manager - StoryWeaver’ in the subject line to [email protected]

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