Do you love data? Do you believe algorithms can help decide what to binge watch on Netflix next and drive social change ? DataKind is an organisation that ‘brings together top data scientists with leading social change organisations to collaborate on cutting-edge analytics and advanced algorithms to maximize social impact.’ To describe the mission of DataKind in the words of it's co-founder, Jake Porway: "We are meticulously focused on bringing data science in all its forms to those who share our vision of a sustainable planet in which we all have access to our basic human needs. We envision a world where organizations tackling those problems have the same access to data science resources that Wall St. and Silicon Valley have."

StoryWeaver is one of four projects chosen for DataKind Bangalore’s Sprint 2018. Sprint consists of a series of events where volunteers of DataKind Bangalore use their Data Science skill to solve challenges experienced by their Non-profit partners. If you’d like to volunteer your skills to our project, read on for more details.

Using technology to address the global book drought

Pratham Books is a non-profit children’s book publisher with a mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and was founded to address the lack of high quality, affordable, multilingual books in India. 

                                              

However, to even begin satisfying the reading needs of a multilingual country such as India, and create equitable access to books for all children we would need to massively scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content. The answer, we believed lay in technology and the power of open licensing.  

StoryWeaver: One platform. Many possibilities.

On StoryWeaver, users can access thousands of multilingual stories for children absolutely free. All content on the platform is openly licensed under CC-BY4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons Licenses. Users can read, download and print all stories and images on the platform, as well as use the tools embedded on StoryWeaver to create and translate content into more languages and versions. In the 2 years since launch we have grown from a repository of 800 stories in 24 languages to a digital repository of over 8000 stories in 111 diverse languages of the world. The 650,000 member strong StoryWeaver community is spread across 220 countries and have read our stories both online and offline over 2.6 million times.  

Project Scalability and Sustainability

StoryWeaver’s growth and ability to scale lies in the fact that the platform is Unicode compliant. This enables content to be transported to different devices easily, and also allows users to create content in their desired language without needing to download special Indic language keyboards. This is imperative, especially in a country like India where there are so many languages in varied scripts.

In addition, Unicode compliancy  has allowed us to add new languages with relative ease, even those with complex scripts like Khmer. Today, StoryWeaver offers users the chance to read, create and translate stories in a plethora of languages: from mainstream Indian and International languages, to tribal (Kora, Santali, Kurukh) and minority languages (Tibetan, Konkani), and even languages categorised as threatened or endangered (Southern Kurdish).

Impact

StoryWeaver has opened up a stream of collaborations with organizations, both in India and globally.

As a classroom tool, StoryWeaver provides educators access to thousands of stories, across genres, reading levels and in multiple languages, for use in the classroom. Teachers can tailor existing content to suit the needs of their students or create brand new teaching resources. Educators have used the platform to create early reading material in minority languages like Tibetan and endangered languages like Kurdish. Rural schools in Maharashtra have downloaded and projected our stories on to classroom walls with the help of Pragat Shikshan Sanstha. Communities Rising downloads and prints much needed books in Tamil and English for after school resource centres in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. While organisations and schools like Mantra4Change, Akanksha and Tamarind Tree  create digital libraries for students and teachers using our content. Content from StoryWeaver has also been gamified on affordable learning apps for disadvantaged children to improve their English, while Bookshare uses StoryWeaver to create accessible content for print impaired children.

By harnessing the power of technology and open licenses and adding the creative power of a collaborative and engaged community, StoryWeaver is working towards addressing the scarcity of multilingual reading resources that exists not only in India but across the world.

Focus Area For DataKind Sprint

As content on StoryWeaver continues to exponentially grow, one of the spaces we wish to improve in is the discoverability of our content. Users on our platform should be able to easily find what they are looking for in our vast repository of 8000 books.

This will be possible with better tagging of our content. While there is a basic tagging process in place for all images and stories on platform, if every story published is automatically tagged with 10 - 25 relevant keywords, it would drastically improve the discoverability of content. Additional steps would include incorporating the most searched words in our tags and even incorporate geotags. We strongly believe these steps would greatly improve the user experience.

StoryWeaver would like to collaborate with DataKind Bangalore to build such a tool during Sprint 2018.

For more details about the Project Accelerator (First event of the Sprint) and to sign up, visit their meetup page here. Also, You may like to join DataKind Bangalore’s slack channel  #pratham_books to actively participate in various discussions.

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It’s FINALLY here! The moment you’ve been waiting for… drumroll please… the results of the Pratham Books Retell, Remix and Rejoice content 2016, Children’s Category.

Before we get to the fun bit, a sincere apology for the delay in announcing the results. But with so many amazing entries in two categories (children and adult), we wanted to make sure our internal and external judges had enough time to do full justice to each and every story written.

This year we received a whopping 119 entries. 30 of those entries were by children and we were pleased to see 4 Hindi stories entered by these budding authors! You can see all the entries in the Children's Category here.

CONGRATULATIONS to…

Shristuti Srirapu for 'Night Trouble' and Aviral Sood for ‘An Escapade’!

That’s right, we have two winners! Shristuti and Aviral will each receive a printed copy of their winning story and a hamper of Pratham Books’ latest titles. Read on to find out who our judges were and what they had to say about the winning entries.

Arefa Tehsin spent her childhood treading the Aravali jungles with her naturalist father. As a child, she was often found trying to catch a snake or spin a yarn. She grew up to be a traveller, storyteller and was appointed the Hon. Wildlife Warden of Udaipur for a term. She is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books including The Elephant Bird. Her latest book is Wild in the Backyard published by Penguin. She writes columns and articles for various national dailies and magazines like The Hindu, Outlook Money, Deccan Herald, TerraGreen etc. A dreamer and rationalist, she is a serial traveller who wants to go on an endless journey starting with planet earth.

BAM! Books is an Instagram-led project which talks about children's and Young Adult books, curated by Bangalore-based writers Bijal Vachharajani and Maegan Dobson Sippy. Focusing largely on books with a South Asian context, BAM! aims to help parents, educators and young readers find books they can meaningfully connect to. Find out more at: https://www.instagram.com/BAM_Books/

What the judges had to say

BAM!Books

On ‘Night Trouble’ A wonderful story about animal behaviour and the illustrations work wonderfully with the text. The idea of the dog asking advice from other animals on how to sleep is also sweet, and well-executed.  We also loved the effective rhyming refrain which gives a rhythm to the dialogue.

On ‘An Escapade’ An imaginative and original interpretation of the images, which nonetheless manages to make good sense of the art. The repetition of 'or so his mother would have said' gives a good rhythm to the story, as well as giving credibility to the direction which the story took in the end!

Arefa Tehsin

On ‘Night Trouble’ Night Trouble has a lovely humourous angle to it, especially coming from a 9-year-old!

On ‘An Escapade’

An interesting tale of a pup running away from home in search of better lands. What for? Due to his nagging mum, obviously. Good story, dialogues, similes and a connect with most of the illustrations.

A big thank you to our amazing judges for taking the time to read each entry and share their feedback and marking. Also, thanks to everyone who took part in the contest, your stories are now on StoryWeaver for you to share with friends and family!

You can read the results for the Adult's Category here.

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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 storybooks 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 openly license our content. All this content is now available on StoryWeaver, which is a digital platform that hosts books in languages from India and beyond, so that every child can have an endless stream of storybooks in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. The platform contains easy-to-use tools to read online and offline, create and translate books. All the books on the platform are openly licensed.

We are looking for a Social Media Manager for StoryWeaver

The role involves developing and implementing strategic engagement initiatives by building and sustaining relationships with multiple stakeholders, and advocating the brand across a variety of social networks.

Illustration by Sayan Mukherjee, for Catch a Ride on Raindrops written by Anjali Vaidya, published by Pratham Books.

Key Responsibilities:

Responsible for all social media handles for StoryWeaver, engaging with and growing our audiences, and contributing towards building StoryWeaver’s brand and visibility. This includes:

• Managing the social media content calendar

• Implementing and Creating campaign promotion and documentation videos

• Implementing paid digital marketing initiatives

• Distributing the brand’s content across a variety of different social networks, and the StoryWeaver Blog.  

• Documenting the use cases of a diverse group of stakeholders from non-profits, community groups, authors, illustrators, publishers, children, parents, etc.

• Using Analytics and other measurement tools to provide reports on metrics, and continually find ways to improve on those metrics through testing and new initiatives.

Required skills

• 3-4 years of experience in social media management

• Familiar with the latest technology, trends and analytics in social media

• Project management, ability to work with tight timelines

• Eye for detail

Nice to have but not mandatory:

• Previous experience in Sales/ Marketing/ Public Relations

• Video skills

Location: 

This is a full-time position and is based out of Bangalore

Compensation: 

Salary will be commensurate with qualification and experience.

Write to us:

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

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