Swara IVR wins mBillionth Award for the 2nd time!

Swara IVR, which won the mBillionth Award for m-News and Journalism in 2010 in it’s avatar as CGNet Swara has won the award again in 2013.
On July 21st, at an awards event organized by the Digital Empowerment Foundation, the Mojolab team spent the day interacting with the best and the brightest in the mobile/social technology space in New Delhi. We also presented the latest updates in the Swara network and showcased some of our future plans. It was a delight sharing space with visionary projects like eduVarta and Kisan Sanchar, last year’s winners.

Graamvani‘s Jharkhand Mobile Radio project, inspired by CGNet Swara, also received a special mention at the awards in the same category.

The CGNet Swara project is the genesis of the Mojolab Foundation, which was formed by CGNet Swara volunteers in May this year.

CGNet Swara was conceived by ex-BBC journalist and  Knight International Journalism Fellow Shubhranshu Choudhary, who began CGNet as an online discussion group for concerned citizens in central India, a region populated primarily by indigenous communities often disenfranchised by non-inclusive development. The IVR component was added in 2010 as an inclusion strategy for people without access to the internet, with help from MIT students under the guidance of Dr. Bill Thies, now with Microsoft Research, Bangalore.

The Mojolab Foundation currently maintains the Swara IVR codebase and provides guidance and consulting services for people and organizations who wish to replicate the Swara success story.

In May-Jun this year, we implemented Swara IVR in the Andhra Pradesh, Bihar/Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh/Chhattisgarh telecom circles in India with the support of the International Center for Journalists. 

Last year, Swara went international with two deployments supported by Internews in Pontianak, Indonesia at RuaiTV, a community television station. We were also at Internews’ Kabul Innovation Lab early this year

 

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