[Wikimediaindia-l] [OT] Voting for a platform for open publishing of children's books

Dear Wikimedians: I realise that this email is off-topic, and apologise in advance for it, but wanted to share it with you because it has a few elements that are of interest to this community - in particular, openly licensed content and fostering indic languages. I used to work at Pratham Books and remain an advisor to them - this is what I worked on over the last five years. [More here: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/Pratham_Books] I'd very much appreciate both your inputs and comments, and if you find the project deserving, your vote. Thank you for your time. Best, Gautam ________ http://prathambooks.org/ <http://www.akshara.org.in/> Pratham Books is a finalist in the Google Impact Challenge<https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/india2013#/prathambooks… in India. Your vote will help them take the joy of reading to the children who need them the most. Pratham Books <http://www.prathambooks.org/> will use this award to amplify their existing work by creating an open source platform that will encourage the creation of new stories, remixing of our openly licensed content and translation of all these stories in local languages. Every creation, new or remixed, will be shared, resulting in a large repository of stories available in various digital formats for free use. All content will be released under Creative Commons licenses. Pratham Books has been a front-runner in adopting a Creative Commons licensing framework<http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Case_Studies/Pratham_Books> and in the last 5 years they have released over 400<http://www.scribd.com/collections/2300329/Creative-Commons-Originals… stories <https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nnlaspmnivrikvt/skJqw4GutK> and hundreds of illustrations<http://www.flickr.com/photos/prathambooks/collections/7215… under a CC-BY <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> or CC-BY-SA<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> license. Since these are provided free of cost and under open licenses, their larger community has created multiple derivative works ranging from iPad and iPhone applications<http://blog.prathambooks.org/2010/05/our-first-ipad-applica…ml>, to porting their works to OLPC laptops<http://blog.prathambooks.org/2009/07/pratham-books-reaches-nepal…ml>, to creating entirely new books<http://blog.prathambooks.org/2010/05/announcing-results-of-retell-… from existing illustrations and creating versions of the same books for the print impaired – from DAISY and Braille<http://www.bookshare.org/quickSearch?keyword=pratham+books> books to rich audio books <https://soundcloud.com/prathambooks> . Their books have been translated to languages that they do not publish in including Assamese, Italian and French with translations in Santali, Hebrew, Malayalam and Konkani underway. Based on these rich experiences, Pratham Books now hopes to build a collaborative platform which will scale their existing production of 1600 books across 12 languages to 20,000 books across 25 languages over 3 years! Millions of children across the globe will benefit from this platform. Click here <https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/india2013#/prathambooks> to vote for Pratham Books. You can also spread the word by : 1. Spreading the word on Google+<https://plus.google.com/106251745479548184530/posts> 2. Sharing it on Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151884608619927&s… 3. Tweeting about the campaign<https://twitter.com/prathambooks/status/392883443589058560> 4. Writing a post on your blog about why you believe in Pratham Books' mission and why you want readers to vote for them. Here's an example from one of our champions<http://readingthroughrsmind.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/because-e… .