Written by Amna Singh

StoryWeaver believes that every child deserves to have access to joyful reading material in her mother tongue. In November 2018, we opened applications to educators, translators, literacy organisations, and everyone else working with children to promote reading -- in our quest for partners to help build a 100 local language libraries of children’s books in underserved languages by International Mother Language Day on February 21, 2019 .

We were seeking partners with relevance of work and expertise in language and translations, and above all, a shared vision of equity in access for all. We got over 225 applications from all over the globe – each application inspiring us with their exemplar work in the field of literacy and language for the under-represented communities.

Based on our guidelines, relevance of work and a rigorous evaluation, we have selected 16 organisations and 28 individual language champions to partner with us to build these digital local libraries.

Selected Organisations: Target Languages

1. Azad India Foundation: Surjapuri

2. BookDash: 11 official South African languages

3. SNS Foundation: Marwari

4. CODE- Ethiopia: Amharic, Afaan Oromoo

5. African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA): Igbo, Hausa, Fante, Ewe, Yoruba, Kikiyu, Luganda and Swahili

6. Global Forum 4 Literacy: Zulu, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Tswana and Arabic

7. Suchana Uttor Chandipur Community Society: Santali, Kora, Bilinguals

8. Aripana Foundation: Maithili

9. Little Readers' Nook: Tulu, Kutchi, Marwari …

10. Unnati Institute for Social and Educational Change: Korku

11. North East Educational Trust: Assamese, Bodo

12. Brightstart Pre Primary school and Learning Centre : Marwari

13. Libreo.ph: Tagalog, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Tausug/Maranao and Ilokano

14. Darakht-e Danesh Library: Pashto

15. Every English: Brazilian Portuguese

16. REHMA: English-Urdu bilinguals

The selected language champions will help build local libraries across 24 languages.

Target Languages: Selected Language Champions:

1. Amharic: Kaleab

2. Bambara: Kirsty Paxton

3. Basa Jawa (Javanese): Maharani Aulia

4. Bundelkhandi: Ankit Dwivedi, Krishna Murary Upadhyay

5. Chinyanja: Agnes Nankhoma Singine Nyendwa

6. Dari: Aisha

7. Filipino: Kaye

8. Garhwali: Shweta Rawat

9. GSB Konkani: Sujith Kamath

10. Kirundi: Melchiade Ntibazonkiza, Adolphe Ndagijimana

11. Kui: Shruti

12. Kumaoni: Somya Budhori , Richa Pathak Pant,

13. Kuvi/Jatapu: Markose K C

14. Malay: David Loiuson

15. Malvani: Rupali Bodekar

16. Malvi: Omprakash Kshatriya

17. Ndebele: Ntando Titus Ntaka

18. Pawari: Amit Dudave

19. Pashto: Nighat Kamdar

20. Sanskrit: Meenakshi Sundaram K B, Priya Bhakthan

21. Serbian: Ana Jovic

22. Sindhi (Devanagari Script): Bharti

23. Sindhi (Arabic Script): Zaib-un-Nisa

24. Vietnamese: Nguyen Dac Thai Hang

 

Thank you for your initiative, we will get in touch with all selected partners for the next steps.

And a BIG thank you to everyone who applied. StoryWeaver is truly a result of your constant support, and contributions. We will do our best to reach out to you and explore alternate ways to collaborate. Thank you, again, and happy holidays!

 

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This position is now closed. Do keep following us on Social Media for news on other openings on the Pratham Books team.

Pratham Books 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.

In the last 3 years, we have invested deeply in technology based initiatives to further our mission. We are now looking for an experienced Product Manager that can lead our digital projects as we significantly scale these initiatives.

                                                                                                 

About the Digital Properties

Pratham Books has two digital platforms - StoryWeaver and Donate-a-Book. 

Storyweaver 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 and the goal is to open source the code as well. In just one year, StoryWeaver has scaled from 800 stories in 24 languages to 2800 stories in 59 languages by engaging with a community of users. We want every child to have access to quality reading resources in their own language. 

StoryWeaver is being recognized as an emerging innovation that can transform the early literacy reader ecosystem globally. Our vision is for StoryWeaver to be the largest multilingual open library in the world for children by empowering communities to address the scarcity of reading resources in their mother tongue languages and scale the quantity and quality of content being produced.

Donate-a-book from Pratham Books is a unique, crowdfunding platform that helps raise funds for organizations that want to build children's libraries.

Job Description                

We are looking for a passionate individual wanting to make a difference, one who believes that technology can be a powerful enabler in creating equitable access to resources. 

This role requires a seasoned manager and technologist who can work effectively, both independently and collaboratively, in a team environment and deliver the project in a timely manner within allocated resources and budgets. The Product Manager will play a strategic role in defining the product roadmap, translating it into detailed requirements and developing a roadmap for delivery. S/he will work closely with the domain, outreach and content teams to define the user requirements which will guide feature development. All aspects of managing the project including the RFP process, vendor selection, hiring of people, documentation and project delivery will be managed by the Product Manager.  

The position will report to the Head of Digital Projects but also requires working closely with the top management. In a 3 year time-frame the project outcomes are expected to scale by 10x and the Product Manager will play a critical role in ensuring  the smooth functioning of the platform at this scale. Most importantly the person needs to be an out-of-the box thinker and should be a strong believer and propagator of use of open technologies.

Responsibilities

• Understand the user requirements and define the product roadmap    

• Generate RFP’s and manage the process of technology vendor selection    

• Prepare the user stories, documentation and compile the platform requirement and workflow documents

• Scope and prioritize the product feature sets 

• Work closely with technology vendors on all aspects

• Ensure the project is done within the budgeted resources

• Optimize the user experience 

• Be an evangelist in the tech community to build awareness around the platform.

Mandatory Requirements

• BTech/MSc/MCA degree in Computer Science or related disciplines

• Proven work experience in product management 

• Strong technical background with hands-on experience in open source web and mobile technologies  

• Very good written and verbal communication skills

• 8 -10 years of experience 

Nice to have but not mandatory

• Experience working with non-profits.     

• Domain knowledge in publishing industry, Indic language experience     

Location: This role is based out of Bangalore and is full-time. The project is expected to complete within a 3 year time-frame.

Salary: Compensation will be commensurate with experience. 

Interested candidates are requested to send in their resume to [email protected]

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Roopa Pai is a computer engineer who always knew she was going to write for children. She is the author of Taranauts, India's first fantasy-adventure series for children in English,and several others, including some for Pratham Books. Her latest bestseller is 'The Gita For Children'. 

This is why I love my job. Every so often, a project comes along that holds out the tempting prospect of a never-before challenge. I take such projects on with (an admittedly nervous) alacrity, because a challenge helps to keeps things fresh - it forces one to shift gears, to look at things through someone else's eyes, to tap into hitherto unexplored veins of creativity. And  when it has been met to the best of one's ability, a challenge leaves one with a sense of accomplishment, of life having been enriched in some small way.

It was precisely such a challenge that Pratham Books' Storyweaver initiative dropped into my lap a few months ago. We want to create wonderful new stories, they said, and we want to create them quick. We want to hear new voices, on a myriad subjects. We want to help children discover disparate worlds - math, the environment, artificial intelligence, good values - through stories that are fun, engaging, and lushly illustrated. And we want to share them all, translated into a dozen different languages, with the world.

And once it is all online, they said, their eyes shining, anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to read them, for free! What's more, anyone, anywhere, can download them, print them, distribute them, translate them into any language in the world, use pictures from different books to weave new stories, or weave together different story threads to spin out brand new tales. Wasn't it all terribly exciting? And would I please be part of it?

It most certainly was, I said. And of course I would!

And that's how I landed my first job as editor. 'Guest editor', more correctly, with the responsibility of finding new children's writers, and generating, through them, four stories involving maths. The stories could be fiction or non-fiction, but they would have to deal with mathematical themes. As a sop to a first-time editor, they graciously allowed that I could write one of the stories myself.

I tossed ideas around in my head - what themes existed in primary-school level maths? Numbers, distances, patterns, measurements, arithmetic... What stories could be woven around them? The Storyweaver team and I went back and forth for weeks, until we came up with a list of ideas that we all agreed held promise. Then I went out to look for my crack team of debutante writers.

I didn't have to look far. Over the past couple of decades, I have had the pleasure of interacting and working with a number of talented, accomplished people who also work with children, but not necessarily as writers. When I had sliced and diced that contacts list to find people with backgrounds in science and / or math, AND people who lived in Bangalore (this for no other reason than that editorial meetings could then involve lots of laughing and chai-drinking), three names emerged. Fortunately for me, they all agreed instantly to be collaborators on an adventure that was new for all of us.

And who were these three people?

There was Gayathri Tirthapura, who trained as an engineer at REC (now NIT) Surathkal, before going off to the US for a double masters (Masters in Science from Stanford, Masters in Education from Harvard) and 10 years in the telecom industry. Since she returned a few years ago, Gayathri has run Kutoohala, a children's activity centre, library and bookstore where she puts all her theories on what makes for a fun, enriching education into practice.

There was Sukanya Sinha, a PhD in Physics from the University of Maryland, who has held research positions in several scientific institutes not just in India but elsewhere and is now a Visiting Professor at the Indian Statistical Institute. But Sukanya is also as much at home with demystifying complex scientific concepts to children - she is part of the founding team of Curiouscity, an organisation that promotes creativity in science among young people.

And there was Shonali Chandy Chinniah, a marine biologist from Cornell who has taught undergrad courses at both American and Indian universities, apart from conducting educational tours at the New Jersey Aquarium and working with NGOs in India to promote science education among the less privileged. Shonali is also part of the founding team of Curiouscity.

Over the course of the next few weeks, at several delightful and wonderfully stimulating editorial meetings (given the formidable - and creative - brainpower I was dealing with, it could not have been any other way), we picked different ideas, toyed with them, wondered if they would work better as fiction or non-fiction, and drank plenty of chai. Then everyone went off to write their stories.

  

The results of that most enriching experience is - or will soon be - up there on Storyweaver for all of you to enjoy. Already up are Sukanya's awe-inspiring  non-fiction story on distances - 'How Far is Far?', and Gayathri's heartwarming fiction story on math in cooking - 'Dum Dum-A-Dum Biryani'. Coming up soon are Shonali's enjoyable non-fiction story - The Fabulous Fibonaccis - on the endlessly fascinating number sequence called the Fibonacci (or Hemachandra) sequence, and my own fiction story based on history and arithmetic - How Old Is Muttajji?

How would I rate my editorial challenge on a scale of 1 to 10? I would go off the scale - it's all allowed in maths - and say 0. Because, like that old song goes, no matter how big the challenge, you can always get by with a little help from your friends.

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