Denis O’Brien, owner of the Digicel Group, graces the cover of the August 11th issue of Forbes Magazine. Their profile, titled ‘Babble Rouser’, begins with a tone of detached and vaguely supercilious astonishment at the risks that Digicel has incurred in the course of its lightning-quick expansion across the island nations of the world. It quickly sobers, though, when it reports that the Digicel Group earned $505 million in operating profit on $1.6 billion in revenue in the financial year ending March, 2008.

Forbes leaves it to O’Brien himself to explain his damn-the-torpedoes philosophy:

“Get big fast. [Damn] the cost. Be brave. Go over the cliff. [The competition] doesn’t have the balls.”

I suspect he used some word other than ‘damn’.

Most anyone would enjoy downing a beer with the honey-tongued chancer from Cork, but Denis O’Brien didn’t make the cover of Forbes merely because of a flamboyant devil-may-care attitude. He’s noteworthy because he saw an opportunity where others didn’t, and he got rich capitalising on it.

The idea is simple enough: If you give everyone – literally everyone – access to mobile services, you can make money everywhere. In O’Brien’s world, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit. Every single market gets aggressively cultivated. The fruits of such labours are truly remarkable.

O’Brien is not the only one to have realised that there are fortunes to be made in places once considered unserviceable. Indeed, much of the government’s telecoms policy is predicated on the certainty that market forces will provide enough incentive to encourage well-funded entities like Digicel to invest in Vanuatu without requiring some sort of financial crutch.

The economic manifestations of Network Effects are becoming increasingly well understood in the business community. Indeed, it appears that TVL has been pleasantly surprised to find that mobile phone services were far from the money-losing service they first thought it would be.

The urge to communicate is fundamental to human nature, and people are willing to go to great lengths to talk to others. More willing, in fact, than they consciously realise. An early usage survey of an email network in the Solomon Islands showed that, contrary to expectations, well over 60% of messages were between family members exchanging news. Those messages cost about 50 vatu each back then.

Digicel is benefiting from this desire to communicate primarily because of its first-mover status and commitment to its chosen course. That implies a fair degree of risk, but risk is one thing the private sector handles better than most others.

Now, let’s not overstate things. Denis O’Brien is not the Oracle at Delphi. He’s simply better positioned than the majority of corporate leaders. What we have here is a corporation tapping new reserves in a market that most others considered unserviceable. The job of other CEOs, as they saw it, was to consolidate revenues and find new ways to tap existing markets. There’s probably not a telecoms CEO anywhere that wouldn’t have been pilloried for attempting what Digicel did. If the board hadn’t ended such apparent rashness, the shareholders certainly would have.

It’s true that O’Brien was one of the first entrepreneurs to see the business potential of Network Effects in the developing world. But the process of commoditisation of hardware and software that made this investment possible has been visible for years.

My first brush with this phenomenon came when I was living on Baffin Island in Canada’s eastern Arctic. In 1994, a few friends and I created the most remote commercial Internet Service Provider in the world. We found that we were able to take a frighteningly expensive satellite link and make good money from it by slicing and dicing the bandwidth between hundreds – and later thousands – of customers.

After only six months of operation about 25% of the local population – over a thousand people – were subscribed to our service. Our competition, belatedly set up and funded by the local telecoms monopoly, had 7 customers. I’ll admit we surprised even ourselves.

Lest this be construed as an exercise in self-congratulation, the lesson here is that Network Effects work. That’s been obvious to anyone who cared to think about it since Bell Telephone president Theodore Vail first described the phenomenon a century ago in 1908. The 1990s saw a resurgence of the effect due to the advent of the Internet. In this decade and the next, low-power handheld devices will be where most of the growth occurs.

To sum up: O’Brien put two and two together, and has made a couple of billion out of it so far.

We can too, if we want. The next wave of innovation in technology and communications is happening right here in the developing world, and thanks to the vision of a few dedicated individuals here in Vanuatu, we’re further along than the majority of our neighbours. If we take advantage of the investment that O’Brien and others are making in Vanuatu, we can become allies in an island-hopping campaign reminiscent of General Douglas MacArthur’s conquest of the Pacific.

Both Digicel and TVL are investing heavily in localisation of staff and management positions. The advent of competition led directly to the promotion of a few key individuals in the TVL hierarchy. Most notable among them was the appointment of the first ni-Vanuatu comptroller in its corporate history.

John Delves, General Manager of Digicel Vanuatu, states that he is “aiming to localise all positions as soon as possible and our current experience is that there is tremendous talent here. Our ultimate goal is for Digicel Vanuatu to be run by people from Vanuatu.”

Judging by its performance in other markets, Digicel seems to favour a high degree of independence in each national operation. This is achieved in no small part because of a willingness to invest in the local population. They are currently actively recruiting both Sales and Technical Operations managers.

But these are not the only opportunities available. Improving communications requires significant policy change and the creation of strong regulatory mechanisms as well. This is another area where Vanuatu can take the lead. Some of the World Bank consultants helping Vanuatu put together its regulatory regime are citizens of Caribbean nations, veterans of the liberalisation process in their region. There is no reason why a few talented ni-Vanuatu couldn’t join their ranks. There will also be demand for logistics experts, marketing and customer service staff – you name it.

The immediate benefits of investing in this area are blindingly obvious. Salaries for skilled technology positions are higher than in most other employment sectors. Work in this field is not bound by geography. I continue to work in Port Vila with clients around the world. This means that we can export our talent throughout the developing world without losing it ourselves.

Digicel is the first company to really grasp the market potential of marginal markets like those in the Pacific. They aren’t the only ones, though. The people of Vanuatu need to take note of this regional phenomenon and commit themselves to strengthening it. If we aren’t complacent about our role in this process, the rewards for us and our neighbours will be considerable.

There’s a pressing need for people to assist with this transition. The barriers have begun to fall that once allowed life in the village to remain consistent, with change seeping in slowly and in tiny doses. Very soon, most everyone in Vanuatu will have access to mobile telephony. We’re already hearing stories about Tannese in Middle Bush bringing their mobile to the garden with them, just in case someone wants to reach them.

Only weeks ago, nobody really got fussed about waiting days or even weeks to hear a bit of news. But now that we can actually get it, we want information immediately. It’s a universal human trait to want to keep caught up on the latest. In the past people here have been content to let information and gossip arrive at its own pace, confident at least that nobody was getting the jump on anyone else. But now, someone who owns a mobile phone holds a distinct advantage over those without. In this culture – and most others – knowledge is power, and in Vanuatu, a new arms race has begun.

The benefits of this rapid and fundamental transformation are undeniable. Health, education, literacy and business development are all areas where the potential improvements are obvious. Governance and civil society should improve as well, if only because people in the village will at last be able to keep track of their MPs, even to the point of calling and reminding them of their promises periodically.

But what about the other side? What will happen when a young man, ripe with ideas he’s acquired on the Internet, begins to question the words of his chief? The ideas may be good, and the chief may even be wrong, but what will the villagers do when they see his guidance being second-guessed?

Rest assured that local beliefs will be assailed. Kastom will be affected, for better and for worse. We need a few people to play a guiding, reconciling role in this process in order to ensure that we don’t become a nation adrift. They would serve – not supplant – kastom, helping it to remain relevant and useful in an age when Vanuatu’s villages take on a global dimension.

There is a strongly technical aspect to this task. I’ve written elsewhere that one of the biggest problems in IT management is the disconnect between the Geek and the Manager: “… the problem, again and again, is that … managers don’t think they need to know the details. And IT consists of nothing but details.”

We don’t (or shouldn’t) hire finance managers who don’t know accounting. We expect the manager of a legal practice to know the theory, practice and details of law better than her staff. IT requires the same detailed knowledge, over a broader scope and in greater depth than most other disciplines. Happily, information is the IT person’s stock in trade. The best geeks aren’t those who know a lot (though it doesn’t hurt). The best geeks are the ones who know how to find anything, and more importantly, who know what to do with the information once they find it.

Without making any claims to wisdom or even usefulness, the following advice is offered to this new generation of young turks whose role it will be to assist in this historic transition that Vanuatu is undergoing….

1) Learn Your History.

Go back and study in detail the how the Internet came to be. Pay special attention to the open, cooperative spirit that was instilled right from the beginning.

Talk to those who were there. Most of its inventors are still alive, and many of them are genuinely interested in what’s happening here in the Pacific. Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, is an honorary member of the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society. He’s taken time from his schedule to join us in Apia at the PACINET conference, so it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that he’d be happy to spend an hour to two talking with someone helping to plot our national IT strategy.

2) RTFM

Read The Fine Manual, as geeks often say. Most importantly, read the Requests for Comment (RFCs), the documents that define every important technical aspect of the Internet. They’re readily available online, and while some of them are a tough slog, they are not optional. IT consists of nothing but details, and this is where the details are.

3) Keep Asking: Why?

One of the fun parts of being a geek is that we get to indulge that very trait that makes every three year old insufferable: We can be – no, we have to be – insatiably curious. Just like the toddler who never stops asking why, we are expected to challenge every assumption, all the time.

The most interesting area of IT is where it comes into contact with society. Ask yourself why IT planning models are built the way they are, in spite of the systemic and often colossal failure that results. Study software licensing through the last three decades. Watch how it changes, consider what that means in terms of code quality, in terms of product management and sales, and most importantly, what its effect is on people.

Keep asking yourself, “If I can copy something for free, why should I pay for it?” The answers, you’ll find, are not nearly as simple as you think, and they will keep changing.

4) Learn the Business Side

No matter what you actually do day to day, you need to understand the business of technology. Most important are pricing models. What does a per-usage fee structure for Internet services tell you about the service itself? About the organisations offering the service? How is technical support factored into a company’s offering? If it’s seen as an expense, what impact will that have on the quality of the support? What if it’s seen as a revenue stream?

What is the cost of IT? How is it factored? Despite years of focus and billions spent and earned, most people cannot satisfactorily answer that question. You need to answer it, if only for yourself, if only for today.

5) Technology is a Process, not a Product

If Ecclesiastes were written today, and David were a geek, he would no doubt say: Process of processes, all is processes. Ultimately, technology consists of layers upon layers of processes. Generations of software come and go, licenses change, products change, and so do capabilities. The only thing we can rely on, then, is the process. The process of learning, applying, then learning some more.

Vanuatu’s young turks have their work cut out for them. The information is all there. The insight, too. What we need to do now is to make sure the two occupy the same space.

I wrote, “Making simple mistakes is the easiest way to expose yourself to attack…. You won’t be targeted so much as stumbled across.”

Within two days of writing about the issue, an online security blog reported a wave of attacks affecting approximately 200,000 web servers. The single most important part of comedy, as they say, is timing.

This latest wave of attacks is important to us for a couple of reasons: It demonstrates that the democratising effect of information on the Web respects no single set of ethics or morality. The very same information-sharing tools that have so empowered people everywhere are being used by vandals and criminals for their own selfish ends as well.

It also means that there are no safe havens online.

Vanuatu is famous for its relaxed atmosphere and the almost overwhelming insouciance of its population. The attitude infects everyone who lives here. It’s sometimes a shock to newly-arrived expats to see just how slowly things can move relative to the place they came from. But inevitably they find themselves settling into the same pace, allowing events that would have made them livid elsewhere pass with a shrug and a sigh.

But the Internet has no borders. Electrons travelling through the networks of the world don’t travel on the right side of the cable in Vanuatu and on the left in Fiji. They don’t slow down in school areas, they don’t stop at Customs for inspection, and the only laws they obey are the laws of physics. They don’t know and, frankly, they don’t care about our laws, attitudes, culture and kastom.

It’s up to us to do that. Grasping the technical, ethical and even moral aspects of the Internet is a very difficult task, mostly because there are no short cuts to understanding, and the ultimate effects of this new technology are very hard to see. It’s true that Vanuatu is years behind the curve in terms of using communications technology, but it’s hard to know where to look for lessons.

The developed world’s communications networks are layered over a century’s worth of infrastructure development. Indeed, the Internet was designed explicitly in order to ensure that communications could continue even in catastrophic circumstances.

Contrast that with the impact of everyday influences such as rain, heat, dust, humidity and insects on communications technology in Vanuatu. It’s fashionable to roll one’s eyes whenever minor things cause major disruptions, but we need to recognise that they do happen, and they’ll continue to happen.

When we compare ourselves to the rest of the developing world, we see more similarities. We can see as well that we’re not so far behind. In fact our small size makes it easier in some ways for us to embark on a programme of lifting ourselves up by our proverbial boot straps. There are technical challenges that we share with many other nations, but choosing which lessons we need to learn from can be a difficult task.

In the mean time, the same threats that assail servers in the US, India and China are also assaulting ours. And the same infections they spread are also infecting our machines.

Viruses and other malicious software are an immediate and pressing problem, because they keep us from spending time and resources on improving and optimising our particular corner of the Internet. They affect us disproportionately because repair, maintenance and service provision is thin on the ground in Vanuatu.

But the problem extends much further than that. We face a lack of depth and breadth of understanding of technical issues that is systemic, nearly universal.

I’ve argued before that our planning in the communications sector should focus on human resource development above all other things. But this should not be construed to mean that we need a lot more computer science graduates. We do need people with more technical background, certainly. But the nitty-gritty technical part often takes care of itself, and technologies change so fast that on the job training is sometimes the only available option.

Back in 1994 or so, the world was just starting to wake up to the World Wide Web. There were no web designers at that time. Nor were there a significant number of people with a background in networks. But there were a lot of people with time on their hands and a love of learning.

In many ways, the Web invented itself. The development of the vast and richly detailed landscape of information, diversions, distractions and threats happened through a cyclical process: The web was easy to access and useful, so people used it, and in the process of doing so, made it easier to access and more useful.

We can expect similar things to happen here in Vanuatu. Some have fretted that low levels of literacy will adversely affect the uptake of written communications like SMS, email and online chat. But the trend in other developing countries is that functional literacy rises even in the absence any formal inputs from government or NGOs. People will always find a way to talk.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t formalise and promote basic literacy and language education nationwide. On the contrary, these efforts are more timely now than ever, but they’ll be most effective if their format facilitates peer education, so that people can share the learning materials freely among themselves.

Likewise, people can be trusted to learn whichever software and interfaces most readily allow them talk. Our standards, therefore, will likely be dictated as much by happenstance as by technical appropriateness: The interface that Person A is most familiar with will almost certainly be what she teaches to Person B. At a certain point, whatever we geeks suggest becomes almost irrelevant.

So how are we to go about improving human resources if the Internet is going to do it all for us, and more to the point, why bother? Isn’t it all going to happen on its own?

A so-called technocratic class will almost certainly arise in Vanuatu, just as it has in every other country. Eventually. But we need it to bloom. We need people who can reconcile the competing and sometimes contradictory themes of learning, culture and safety on the Internet and in traditional Vanuatu life. If we don’t, we may find that we’ve bought technological sophistication at the expense of social and cultural stability.

It won’t be enough for our new generation of geeks to be the best in Vanuatu; they’ll be operating in a world without borders or backwaters. They will have to be as good as the rest of the world, because they’ll be responsible for making Vanuatu’s communications environment as fruitful as possible for everyone here.

The process is cyclical, and when it works it’s self-sustaining. But it needs to start somehow. The way to do that is to create opportunities to learn, to work and especially to play with the Internet. That means creating the positions and resources necessary to foster growth and exploration. It means creating the means for people to learn in-depth, practical skills through experimentation, development and implementation. But mostly it means commitment.