John Digrado, CPA – John has led the charge to get all of Open Mind – Question Box’s paperwork in order and up to date with the Federal and State tax and regulatory boards. John has filled out hundreds of pages of government forms, organized our books, and generally been a great intermediary between us and the government. Thank you John!

Brendan Cassidy is our summer intern in Pune, India.  Brendan is improving the Question Box hardware, and creating formal manuals and documentation.  He’s doing a great job and surviving monsoon season.

Caitlin Feeney is just about to finish her 2 month internship. She’s diligently cleaned up all of Open Mind’s contact files, secured a free account for us at Salesforce.com to manage the contacts, created our upcoming newsletter (our first!) and translated our entire site into  Mandarin Chinese!

Hayley Tobin has just come on board, and already has drafted a manual and new website content. We’re looking forward to her assistance through September.

Arjun Sivakumar has worked with us for two summers, and we are sad to lose him to law school! Arjun has written countless grants and conducted significant research.

Software engineer Chokha Palayamkottai, founder of Integralops, has volunteered his company’s engineers to build the next generation of Open Question software! This software will enable organizations to run their own Question Box hotlines from their offices. Big thanks to Open Mind Board member Farida Paramita, who is managing the project, and who designed the user interfaces.

Megan MacMurray has been terrific, cleaning and updating our website and enabling new features. Thanks to Geetika Agrawal for being part of the online Question Box collective and offering design guidance.

Lastly, thank you to Raymond Ellis, Rebecca Seguerre, Nitin Gambhir, Oliver Zee, Kristin Cornuelle, and Rene Kathawala at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP for securing Open Mind’s 501c3 status, walking us through trademark and IP issues, and working on contracts. We are very grateful for your time and contributions.

Question Box’s strength lies in our volunteers, community, and partners. We invite you to join us with your talents to bring knowledge and understanding to the world.

A Young User at Maher Home for Children, Vadu, Maharashtra, India

Hardware & Software Engineering, Pune, India

Program Intern

Rose Shuman, founder of Open Mind and Question Box Project will be speaking at an exciting Africa Gathering in London themed “World leading technologies changing Africa” on July 3rd, 2010.

Africa Gathering brings technophiles, thinkers, entrepreneurs, innovators and everybody else together to talk about positive change in sustainable development, technology, social networking, health, education and good governance in Africa. More info…

In a video interview with the Guardian, Rose Shuman talks about the pace of Internet spread in the developing world ahead of the ACTIVATE 2010 summit.She is a speaker at the summit.

The Guardian’s Activate Summit is a unique and powerful gathering of global visionaries at the Guardian’s headquarters in London.Its a packed day of ideas and inspiration, providing insight into how the web and the myriad technologies that weave it all together are reshaping our world.

Question Box gets written about in Deutsche Welle.

Excerpt:

“Maher founder Sister Lucy Kurien, 54, said Question Box was useful for students who need help with homework and want to find out about exam results. Although that information has been available online, students couldn’t access it – until now.

‘It has been very difficult for them, unless they get (the information) from the newspaper or the radio,” she said. “And we have a simple television program, but we don’t have a television cable connection. It has been very difficult.’ ” Read full article

To celebrate, we are starting our first-ever fundraising push! Open Mind is raising $30,000 in order to build a Question Box Total Toolkit that will enable any organization to build and run their own local language telephone hotline. Can you help? Please Donate Now!

Deutsche Welle DW radio QB – It’s in English!

DW reporter Michael Atkin was present at a Question Box inauguration at Maher home for women and children. Hear his firsthand reporting of what he saw and experienced live, and how Question Box became accidentally involved in a competition between two local political parties when each claimed Question Box was their initiative!

Link to Deutsche Welle