DV Workshop: Melanie Edwards and Brij Kothari
Date: 3/13/2007
Melanie Edwards
Melanie Edwards has worked for 15 years in international business and development. Previous to her experience with global digital divide initiatives, she worked in management for J.P. Morgan and International Data Group (IDG). She launched the Global Technology Corps, a “digital Peace Corps” now operating within the U.S. Department of State. Melanie then co-created the United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). MobileMedia evolved out of her work at Stanford as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow. Currently, she is a lecturer on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University. Melanie received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and M.A. from The Fletcher School of International Relations, Tufts University.
Brij Kothari
Dr. Brij Kothari (Cornell University) and his team have innovated, researched, and nationalized the use of “Same Language Subtitling” (SLS) on Bollywood film songs on TV, for mass literacy in India. He laid the foundation for the SLS project in 1996, as an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) in its Centre for Educational Innovation.
Brij co-founded PlanetRead.org and BookBox.com as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University (2003-04) and currently serves as the President and CEO, respectively. PlanetRead is a non-profit involved in scaling up SLS efforts in India and Africa with support from the Google Foundation and World Bank. BookBox, Inc, a for-profit social venture producing children’s animated stories in more than 25 languages.
The SLS project has received awards from the Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose), Development Marketplace (World Bank, Washington D.C.), the Institute for Social Inventions (London), and Manthan (New Delhi).
Brij grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram at Pondicherry and went on to get a Masters in Physics at IIT Kanpur, Masters in Development Communication and Ph.D. in Education at Cornell University.