Booting ahead info@openresearch.co.za
Current Projects
E-waste: Developing a discussion document on electronic waste for the Association for Progressive Communications
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CATIA: Report on the impact of project components on media coverage of ICTS in Africa
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Communicating the Arts: Monitoring arts coverage in South Africa's mass media, in partnership with the Media Monitoring Project
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OSISA-supported Open Source portal for NGOs: an online information resource for southern Africa, in partnership with Tectonic More >>

Previous Projects
Community ICT access initiatives: Potential strategic interventions
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CATIA: TCO comparison between new and refurbished PCs in delivering ICTs to Africa
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itrainonline: module development: "An introduction to basic research methods", developed for the Association for Progressive Communications

South African Media Audit - HIV/AIDS: Wide-ranging communications audit conducted for the Panos Institute and John Hopkins University
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Highway Africa: Facilitating the participation of Civil Society Organisations on behalf of the Heinrich Böll Foundation
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Alastair Otter


[Open Research projects:   CATIA    Open Source Africa   Community ICT Access Initiatives]

Alastair Otter is a media technologist with more than ten years experience in both printed and digital media.

He is the founder of Tectonic an online publication that is widely respected and the premier source of Open Source news from and for Africa.

He has developed and built the custom-made publishing tools necessary to manage, maintain and grow a vibrant electronic publication in a rapidly growing market. He recently released the source code for the publishing tools into the Open Source community.

Some of the roles he has fulfilled over the past years include production work for Business Report - the Independent Newspapers' national financial daily - including the design and launch of the paper's weekend editions. At ITWeb, South Africa's most popular online technology publication, Alastair was the Technology Editor as well as editor of the Linux and Open Source sections.

During this time he also contributed extensively to the debate surrounding Open Source technology through a weekly column published by ITWeb, regular contributions to Brainstorm magazine and a working relationship with a range of Open Source advocacy projects.

Alastair continues to contribute to this debate by contributing feature articles to magazines as well as editing the Linux pages for Systems publication Computer Week Strategist.