New subject: Pratham Books' CC-powered Story Weaver Platform

9 Sep 2015

Hi all and sorry for cross-posting. Sharing this here because it's all
openly licensed and because we'd be happy to see you all re-use the content
and perhaps translate and remix stories too.

I wanted to share this with you since it is Creative Commons powered and
that we have talked about it in the past.. It launched yesterday. We'd be
very grateful if you could share it with your local Wikipedia communities.

https://storyweaver.org.in/

Blog post: http://blog.prathambooks.org/2015/09/the-future-is-open.html

If we could have one wish, it would be this : Joyful reading material for
all the 300 million children of India. So they could fall in love with
reading, and discover new ideas, new thoughts, and eventually, have richer
lives.

In the past ten years, at Pratham Books <http://www.prathambooks.org/>,
we’ve created inexpensive, but high quality storybooks and spread them
across schools and libraries in every corner of the country. We reached
millions of children, but we still had a long way to travel to reach each
of those 300 million little minds.

2008 introduced us to two little letters that would change the way we
worked. And brought us closer to that one wish. Those two letters were CC
or Creative Commons <http://creativecommons.org/>.

<http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZfRnvcPs1Lg/Ve2OvWSinXI/AAAAAAAAJh8/-0mMWoep-1s/s1600/Open%2BContent.jpg>

Creative Commons took conventional publishing wisdom of restrictive
copyright and threw it to the wind. It meant that when we released our
stories under this open license, we gave anyone the right to use, share or
even build upon the creative work that we were licensing. It allowed our
stories to travel to places that we couldn’t reach directly. It opened the
doors to readers – of all ages, geographies, and nationalities. It’s how
our stories found their way into newer languages, audio versions, YouTube
videos, and digital apps. Its how a whole new multiplier effect got
created.

<http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-El88gCOo8xo/Ve2PC8dnvsI/AAAAAAAAJiE/ig5vSiGaMl4/s1600/P5070574.JPG>

This led us to our brand new initiative, *StoryWeaver
<https://storyweaver.org.in/>*, an open source platform of multilingual
children’s stories. StoryWeaver is a window into this enchanting world of
Open stories and images and languages. Open to parents. Open to educators.
Open to other publishers. And, most importantly, *open to children!*

Log onto *StoryWeaver* <https://storyweaver.org.in/> from a desktop
computer, laptop, tablet or mobile phone. You can then read from a
collection of 800 stories in 24 languages. You can create a new story from
a bank of 2000 images. You can translate any of the stories into newer
languages and share them with others. You can print and use the stories in
the way that you want. And also connect with a community of content
creators and readers. And this is just the beginning. We will continue to
grow the repository through more participation and more collaboration with
like-minded partners.

Imagine a story written in English being translated into ladakhi, being
read by children in Kashmir. And the same illustrations being used by a
teacher in bihar to retell the story. And the same story being versioned
into a play in assamese. The possibilities are endless.

We believe that the joy of reading is the greatest gift of all. So we’re
giving it – to the children of India, and the world. Not just for now, but
for the future.

We believe in Open!

<http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-khcB170mbeo/Ve2PR3XtkSI/AAAAAAAAJiM/yKjsR78sUEA/s1600/P5070468.JPG>

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam
________
http://prathambooks.org/