Grand Jury Report
The Manthan Award 2007 Grand jury is over. Out of 400 applicants, 354 final nominations were screened in 15 categories, winners chosen and results are individually informed to the winners, while it is kept secret for the larger audience until September 21-22, 2007when the Award ceremony slated to take place at India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC), New Delhi. The Grand Jury details are hereunder :

THE MANTHAN AWARD 2007
Grand Jury Report

THE MANTHAN AWARD 2007 GRAND JURY
Date: 23-24 August, 2007
Venue: Board Room
Tata Consultancy Services
5th Floor, PTI Building
4 Parliament Street,
New Delhi 110 001

The Manthan Award 2007 Grand jury is over. Out of 400 applicants, 354 final nominations were screened in 15 categories, winners chosen and results are individually informed to the winners, while it is kept secret for the larger audience until September 21-22, 2007when the Award ceremony slated to take place at India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC), New Delhi.

The jury process started at 11 A.M. on August 23 and continued till 6 P.M. on August 24. Mr. Osama Manzar, Chairman, Manthan Award, briefed the jury members about the jury process before the actual jury process started. Prof. K Kannan, Vice Chancellor, Nagaland University chaired the first day jury session while Mr. Sanjeev Chopra, Secretary, Government of West Bengal chaired the second session of the jury process.

THE MANTHAN AWARD NOMINATION 2007
The response for call of nominations for the Manthan Award this year has been overwhelming and around 400 nominations were received from all over India for the fifteen categories. It is interesting to inform that e-Governance, e-learning, e-education, e-enterprise and livelihood, and e-health received maximum nominations.

CATEGORIES OF AWARD FOR MANTHAN AWARD 2007:
The jury process was conducted across all the 15 categories of nominations spread across two consecutive days of screening nominations:

• e-Business
• e-Learning
• e-Culture
• e-Government
• e-Health
• e-Enterprise & Livelihood
• e-Entertainment
• e-Inclusion
• e-Education
• e-News
• e-Localisation
• e-Youth
• m-Content
• e-Environment
• Community Broadcasting

THE MANTHAN AWARD 2007 GRAND JURY
The Grand Jury took place at TCS Board Room, Parliament Street, New Delhi. The jury process, hosted by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), brought together 19 experts from different fields, such as academia, media, industry, associations, civil society, and technology. The jury had been independent, non-political and only followed the rules and guidelines set out by the Manthan Award. All selection and award decisions made by the jury were taken as final and were not necessitated to be challenged legally or in any other way.

All nominated products were evaluated in a two-round judging process, and subsequently, India’s Best e-Contents and Applications were selected. A few nominated products (Best Products) were awarded with a special mention. The decision for the jury process has been made by the Manthan Award Board of Directors, which is inline with World Summit Award jury processes.

The jury acted independently from the organizers and conveners and all vested interests, and followed only the guidelines for participation published in advance for the Award. All selection and award decisions made by the jury were final. The selections of the winners were made by the jury. The jury was given full freedom to choose not to give an award in any given category.
Jury and Selection Process
The Manthan Award jury 2007 is composed of most eminent content Industry personalities, proposed from government, industry database of evaluators, such as academia, media, industry, associations, civil society, and technology. The final jurors have been selected by the Board of Directors of the Manthan Award.

Jury Location and Evaluators Briefing
The jury meetings and all evaluation were held in New Delhi at TCS Delhi office in Parliament Street where suitable technical and physical infrastructure were made readily available with high speed online access for the evaluators to validate nominations.

A comprehensive official instruction of the jury regarding the call for entries, the entire evaluation process, the Award rules and the rules governing the jury evaluation based on the documents approved by the Manthan Award Board and this Jury Evaluation Guide were made available.

Evaluation Criteria
Elaboration of the categories of the Award and the criteria were made and explained during the briefing of evaluators by the moderator Mr. Osama Manzar, Chairman, Manthan Award. The criteria were tied to the concept of value added for users and e-contents for a purpose.

• CONTENT: Quality and comprehensiveness of content;
• INTERFACE: Ease of use: functionality, navigation and orientation;
• IMPACT: Focus on the actual impact due to particular e-Content interventions at the community level;
• STRENGTH OF IDEA & EXECUTION: Value of the idea and how effectively it has been executed;
• THE OUTREACH: The focus is to be on the outreach of any intervention, its reach geography and demography wise;
• TECHNICAL REALIZATION: Quality of craftsmanship & Creativity;
• STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE: for the global development of the Information Society;
• ACCESSIBILITY: according to the W3C (www.w3.org)Switching the category of the product The juries were given the right to switch a product from one category to another if the category chosen by the producer is recognized as unsuitable. Category switch was out of result of a discussion followed by a vote amongst the panel members.

THE MANTHAN AWARD JURY PROCESS
Round 1

• The 1st round of the jury process was entirely based on online system, developed through stringent methodology where mathematical permutation and combinations have been incorporated into the back end based on the parameters
• Each and every nomination is supposed to be voted/marked and evaluated by at least three jurors and their markings area translated into mean value
• The products were divided into groups, according to the product categories
• Outcome: A Shortlist of maximum of 5-8 products per category (based mainly on the rank list of technical score)

Round 2

• Second plenary was based on totally offline discussion, methodology where presentation, methodology where and consensus
• Participated by every juror, in second plenary, the short listed methodology where methodology where nominations methodology where went through joint voting system by hands up
• Discussion and voting on the winner per category by the plenary
• Outcome: A Winners List of 3 nominations per category; and as the case required, there were Special Mentions in few categories

Special Mentions

• Panel Presentations and discussion on the best products from each category based mainly on the rank list from the second round) and also those who would have gone to third round but did not made it to the final list were picked up as special mentions.
• Outcome: A list of special mentions – best products from each of the 5 national regions, one/two/3 per category depending upon the consensus from the juror.

THE COMPLETION OF THE JURY PROCESS
The jury process concluded on August 24th. After two days hectic schedule and mind striking exercises, the jury members came out with the list of winners and special mentions after lot of discussions, cross-arguments and debates, preceded by online screening process. At the end of the day 29 winners were selected along with 11 special mentions. methodology where

JURY COMMENTS
The following are instant comments from the jury members after the completion of the jury process that they thought have struck their ideas and thoughts over the entire two days exercise. The Manthan Award team is extremely grateful to the distinguished Jury Chairs and members to have spent two days valuable time and energy in devoting to this noble cause of churning out ICT and content practitioners and innovators across India:
“I felt humbled. I should become a student again,”- Prof. K. Kannan, Vice Chancellor, Nagaland University

“Could have spent a few days doing this. Felt at once a student as well as a teacher evaluating scripts,”- Amir Ullah Khan, Fellow, India Development Foundation

“You really made us work for a good reason,”- Piyush Gupta, National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG), Hyderabad

“A great platform to see and understand the work happening around the country. The opportunity was both great as it was rare too,”- Ashish Garg, Global e-School Community Initiative (GeSCI)

“Challenging and great fun! Thanks for the opportunity,”- Manas Chakrabarti, American India Foundation

“Manthan goes from strength to strength – its going amazing how many great ICT ideas you have unearthed!”- Sajan Venniyoor, UN Solution Exchange

“Now I got the real feel of what goes behind in choosing the awardees. The process is so challenging, the entrees are unique and universal. Great education. Thanks,”- Madhura Chatrapathy, Asian Centre for Entrepreneurial Initiatives (ASCENT), Bangalore

“Great learning experience for me. Excited at the length, breadth and depth of e-Content,”- Naimur Rahman, OneWord South Asia

“This time the arrangements and process was much better. Keep it up and all the best,”- Rufina Fernandez, NASSCOM Foundation

“Its gets bigger, better and more tiring,”- Rajan Varada, TFTP, Bangalore

“An experience of great value. Being a Manthan awardee as well a juror now, I know both sides of it!! Great. Keep it up!!- S.N. Goswami, Media Lab Asia

GRAND JURY SUGGESTIONS / FEEDBACK
The Manthan Award 2007 Grand Jury was conducted successfully on September 21-22, 2007 at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Board Room, PTI Building, Parliament Street, New Delhi. The jury was hosted by TCS. Members of the jury devoted two consecutive days devoting time and energy in the entire nomination exercises going through the details of nominations, in both online format, and in presentations moderated by chairpersons / moderators.
The best part of the entire jury process was the valuable suggestions that cropped up during the sessions. Members were frank and honest enough in detailing and listing out limitations of the jury process and coming out with valuable suggestions:

• There is need for more clarity and definitions of categories;
• The parameters for determining the nominations must be more detailed and clear; the specifics of the parameters must be clearly indicated for facilitating the jury process; they must be more explanatory in order to avoid any confusions
• The copy right issues of nominations must be clearly indicated. In other words, every nominations must be ending with undertaking that the nomination is independent product, or created by parent organization etc
• There is need to invite implementers, producers, creators, users related to any e-Content product or innovation during the award ceremony
• The time period for screening out nominations could be increased because of the vastness and diversity of nominations that require more concentration, understanding and listing into proper perspective bef methodology where ore any selection or rejections
• There is need methodology where to clearly define what is methodology where ‘e- Content for Development’ or any clarifications that clears the air of confusions of any product that is created by private and corporate groups and that created by civil society bodies, and yet both reaching out to the masses