This position has been filled! Do keep following us on Social Media for updates on other job openings. 

You’re reading about this position because you believe in the power of content - good content. Similarly, at Pratham Books, we believe in the power of stories – good stories. For well over a decade we have strived hard to reach children across India with a variety of award-winning stories across 18 Indian languages. With our digital crowd-sourcing platform – StoryWeaver we now share the power of stories with a global community of educators, parents, authors, illustrators and translators.

                     

About the role

Pratham Books is 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 Head of Digital Initiatives and will work closely with different internal and external stakeholders. This is a full time position based out of Bengaluru.

The individual will be responsible for all the following

Strategic Partnerships

1. Create partnership opportunities with other publishers to open license their content on the platform
2. Create partnership opportunities with Indian Universities and Language Institutes to increase the pool of good quality translations on the platfor
3. Identify and forge partnership opportunities with international organizations like Translator without Borders  to nurture translation partnerships in International language
4. Working closely with the content team for sourcing children's stories under open licences from across the globe

Programme Management & Design     

1. To build a strong cohesive programme operations team including setting up the Studio department and putting the processes and work-flows in place
2. To ensure that we meet our commitments to donors, delivering projects on time and on budget, and delivering the committed activities and project reports in compliance with the project design
3. To work closely with all stakeholders to ensure high quality standards are met for crowd-sourced content - including review processes and red flagging of inappropriate content
4. To take on other tasks or responsibilities, as required for the project  
5. Archiving and documentation

Content Migration

 

1. Prioritizing the pipeline of content from all sources for migration
2. Managing the studio teams for the timely delivery of large scale data migration
3. Working closely with the design teams to define new design templates 
4. Work with the technology partners to develop efficient processes for content migration

Liaison with co-collaborators & internal stakeholders:

 

1. Creating a database of content creators, authors, illustrators, translators, etc on the platform to enhance engagements
2. Work closely with the marketing team to come up with interesting promotions to promote use of content
3. Work closely with the content, research and marketing teams to deliver the project goals

Required Skills

1. Post graduate in Literature / Communication / Journalism with 7-10 years of experience in related fields. Experience with a publishing house is favourable.     
2. The candidate must have experience working in an editorial position in a publishing house and should have hands-on experience in review, proofreading and production related processes.
3. Exceptional communication skills     
4. Highly organized and detail oriented
5. A proven track record to manage, lead and deliver large-scale operations
6. Proven ability to build consensus and work effectively within a cross-departmental team     
7. Self-starter, team player, strategic thinker and all around book nerd
8. Passion, integrity and energy!     

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: Position is based out of Bangalore and is full-time.

Salary: Will be commensurate with experience. We are looking for a passionate individual who wants to be part of a team that is creating a new model in multilingual publishing to address the scarcity of books for children in need.

Interested candidates can email their resume to [email protected]

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The Asia Foundation is an international nonprofit that helps societies work towards a peaceful, just, and thriving region, and currently works to improve the standard of living across Asia, from Sri Lanka to Mongolia. Improving literacy levels is integral to the work the organisation does, and they have spearheaded a number of programmes across the region to this end.

One such initiative is Let’s Read!  which pledges to provide storybooks to children across the continent. “Through technology initiatives and book donations, we help infuse students with a love of reading essential for literacy,” says Melody Zavala, director of the Books for Asia program at The Asia Foundation.

As part their Let’s Read! campaign, The Asia Foundation has created e-libraries that are accessible on any device. "The e-library works in low-bandwidth environments and doesn't require an active internet connection for reading and hence are able to reach children even in areas with poor bandwidth and infrastructure. Books available are in the mother tongue languages of the children. “We know that children learn first and best in their mother tongue. So we want to make local publications available to more children and stimulate their imagination in ways that can only be possible in a local context,” commented Melody.

To provide a wide range of these books, The Asia Foundation used the vast collection of stories available on StoryWeaver. “The translate tool on StoryWeaver attracted us, as once a language (e.g. Thai) is available on the platform, we can get stories translated and provide a large number of quality children’s literature to our partner schools,” shared Melody.

Being able to draw on StoryWeaver titles has been invaluable to the Let’s Read! initiative, shares Melody. The initiative incubates innovative digital, print, and community-based solutions to "improving access to high-quality children’s books in mother tongues and national languages and currently consists of integrated e-book library, translation, and content creation projects.

Stories in Khmer

“So far, we’ve translated 9  titles into Khmer which are all available on StoryWeaver.  The stories are also available on our Cambodia project site, along with new stories created in Khmer by local authors and illustrators during our e-book hackathons." informed Melody. "In Cambodia the  Ministry of Education’s online education portal will also link to these stories, hence making them available to their 1.5 million followers. he stories will also be made to other Khmer educational apps and projects, including Khmer LEARN, which has 38,000 users, and the Library For All app, which is used in 5 rural schools  

Increasing content in ethnic minority languages

In Thailand, StoryWeaver content will be translated as a part of the Let’s Read initiative there that utilizes a suite of integrated smartphone apps – a translation tool and free story reader app  - to increase content in ethnic minority languages.  A Let’s Read! translation workshop  took place in Chiangmai, Thailand where 10 Pratham Books titles from StoryWeaver were translated from Thai into S’gaw Karen. The programme will initially be implemented in 10 villages and positively impact 1,000 children.  S'gaw Karen is spoken by over four million S'gaw Karen people in Burma, and 200,000 in Thailand. The Asia Foundation will be using their own Thai translations on StoryWeaver to create joyful reading material in S'gaw Karen. Content translation for programmes in Bangladesh has also been initiated."

  

Participants at the ChiangMai workshop. Images courtesy Kyle Barker, The Asia Foundation.

You can read the Khmer translations uploaded by The Asia Foundation here. Keep following us on twitter for more updates about our work with them. 

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In January, 2015, Pratham Books sent out a big, bold ask into the universe! We asked illustrators to delight millions of children by creating a story in 6 frames and donating it for free under the CC-BY 4.0 license! The illustrations were then to become a part of an open-source, digital repository of magic! Stories and illustrations in languages from around the world, all openly-licensed and available for free.

Yup! You guessed it: StoryWeaver! But back then, it was just a twinkle in the eye of Pratham Books’ ambitious team!

We opened the challenge up to budding, aspirational and professional illustrators above the age of 16 and found 8 hugely talented illustrators (we called them 'Illustrator Gurus') who were more than happy to judge the best entries and also champion the cause by contributing a #6framestory. Winning entries were promised a pairing with published authors who would weave a story around their illustrations! (If you want to read more about the contest, click here.)

We shared a word cloud for the illustrators to use as themes and even wrote 6 simple narratives and shared them online for those illustrators who wanted a ready-made story. 

The response was overwhelming and in a sense, a true indication of the immense potential of community and collaboration! What had started as an experimental campaign soon blossomed into a carnival of art, birthing 450+ new illustrations. From watercolour and digital art, to simple black and white drawings, the entries were hugely diverse.

Archana Sreenivasan, Niloufer Wadia and Jithin Jacob were the three winners of the contest. You can read the stories created with their illustrations here, here and here. Some of these illustrations were used by Pratham Books to create delightful new stories (in English and Hindi) for early readers. 

While we're in the process of uploading all the #6frame artwork to StoryWeaver, we thought it would be wonderful to look back at some of the entries submitted for the contest and share them with our ever-growing community of children, authors, illustrators, translators, parents and educators!

Every Friday, we’ll be sharing an illustration from the #6FrameStoryChallenge. So look for #6FramesFriday on @PBStoryWeaver on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. 

Tell us which ones you love, create stories with them on StoryWeaver, or just lose yourself in their beauty! See you every Friday! We promise to make your weekend fun.

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