The Bobs: My Vote for Best Innovation

“The Bobs” are awards given to people and organizations considered to accomplish the best of online activism that given year. 20 awards exist, covering 14 languages. Six of these awards are multilingual, meaning all organizations and projects are eligible, regardless of the language. The remaining 14 recognize the best of online activism per language including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. The six multilingual awards have both a jury and people’s choice award and consist of the following categories: Best Blog, Best Innovation, Best Social Activism, Reporters without Borders Award, Global Media Forum Award, and Most Creative and Original. In contrast, the language-specific awards are only “People’s Choice.”

Visit The Bobs here.

I am personally very interested in the way technology drives progress in non-technical disciplines, and for that reason, I find “Best Innovation” to be a very interesting category. According to the Bobs website, Best Innovation recognizes “software solutions, applications or internet platforms that dedicated themselves to providing technology which enables people to improve society and increase democratic social integration”. In other words, it awards technology that allows for the betterment of society and increase of democracy.

One of the nominated projects is BanglaBraille which aims to braille and audiotextbooks for visually impaired students in Bangladesh. It has been estimated that 50,000 school children in Bangladesh are unable to study because of the extreme expenses of braille textbooks. Furthermore, close to 1 million people in Bangladesh have visual impairments, demonstrating that this is a consistent issue across generations and one that needs to have innovative solutions proposed to help these disabled students. BangaBraille is a highly innovative endeavor in the way it combines social media and crowdsourcing to assemble the volunteers that are moving this project forward. Using internet-based collaboration, these online volunteers have helped transcribe textbooks into digital form for both print and audiobooks. Ten different grade levels worth of material is currently available on the BanglaBraille website. This project deserves to be recognized for its unique way of including citizens in this work. For if a project like this has success in Bangladesh, it will surely be spread to other countries as well – it can act as the starting point for helping all visually impaired students get the affordable educational materials they need to set up their life.

BanglaBraille's logo. Visit their website here.

The braille alphabet. 

Crowdsourcing and integrating social media to do so is a fascinating way of engaging the public in a way that is not too taxing for one individual, but still has the potential to move mountains and achieve so much. By spreading awareness of the issue and asking that people participate in feasible, meaningful ways, this project has created a scalable and spreadable solution to go augmenting the resources available to this minority group.

Click here to visit the site and contribute in whatever way you can.