I like good engineering, good design and efficient performance. In short, I like things that do their job well, whatever that job may be. I like it so much that I hate to settle for less than the best. Not the biggest, necessarily, nor the most expensive. Just the best.

This focus on tools made me lose sight of a couple of important things: First, while doing things perfectly is a commendable ideal, it happens exactly 0% of the time in the real world. Second, Vanuatu is more, er, ‘real world’ than many other places on Earth.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a bit of a leftie when it comes to computing. I like to see as much power in the hands of the people as possible. While it’s nice – and often necessary – to rely on services provided by others, I’ve always believed that DIY is the most empowering way to go. So, when the news began to percolate out that Vanuatu would have truly national mobile phone services, I was interested mostly in how that might help the spread of computers into the islands.

What I didn’t consider is that the mobile might actually become the computer.

The road to Damascus has been a long-ish one for me. Looking back, I have to chuckle that it didn’t become obvious to me sooner that using mobile telephones as a data entry and display terminal was a viable approach to extending many useful services to the islands.

Email, news, commodity prices and market reports, shipping schedules, financial transactions, even census data and business license applications and health data… all of these can be managed by using a mobile phone to access a central data service. As long as only small amounts of data are sent at a time, everything works just fine.

For the time being, at least, mobile phones are among the very few devices that can run in places with little or no power generation. The amount of power generation required to run most computers adds enough to their cost that they will remain out of reach of the majority of the population. So far, the One Laptop Per Child Project’s XO laptop is the only device that might be capable of running in the islands without significant infrastructure upgrades. But even then, it requires at least nominal access to the Internet to work to its full potential.

The lowest-cost alternative for Internet access today is VSAT, a small satellite dish technology. But local operators charge around a million vatu a pop for these, and that’s not including ongoing Internet charges. For VSAT to be feasible, a good deal of cooperation would be required, because the cost would have to be shared by a number of parties. Based on current pricing models, the amount of bandwidth available to any given individual would be meagre indeed.

Mobile telephony has often been described as a leap-frogging technology, in that it allows developing areas to jump past the prior technological stages that developed nations have transitioned through. There’s no need to install expensive copper wiring and a power grid. Just throw up a few towers, run your equipment using solar and/or wind power, and as they say, Bob’s your uncle.

India, Uganda and many other developing countries have made large investments in leveraging this approach to ensure that even the most underprivileged in their societies have access to basic information services. I’ve not been alone in noting that mobile phone credit actually serves as currency for small transactions in many parts of the world. It’s safer, it’s harder to steal or to lose, and it doesn’t lose its value.

Building mobile-based software applications is not terribly difficult. In principle, it’s like constructing a text-only website. Someone sends you a text message; you process the data and send a message back with the results. This kind of transactional computation is probably easier to design and implement than just about any other. The phone number and a pass-code are enough to verify the identity of parties on both ends of the transaction, so security is actually easier to enforce than on the web.

In order to make this all work, we need to be sure that there will be a degree of consistency and cooperation between all parties involved. Market forces should be sufficient to encourage much of the early development. As long as businesses are given room to work in, they will likely come up with more mobile-based services than we might have thought possible.

Possible pitfalls include services being available only through a particular carrier, or only for a particular kind of device. Much less likely – but still a possibility – is the issue of access to the information systems themselves. The right to repackage and re-sell services will need to be carefully protected, in order that smaller operators can develop their own niche markets, thus enlarging the common pot.

Mobile telephony-based information services help us to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But we need more than this to get off the ground. Mobile phones can do a lot, but they can’t do everything. Online learning, for example, pretty much requires computers and the Internet. Leveraging this basic level of communications into something better will still require that we figure out how to run robust, energy-efficient computers in rural settings.

Right now, we have a few people of vision leading the charge towards a national communications roll-out. But it must be admitted that a formal, truly national ICT strategy exists only in a fragmentary way. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities has published a telecommunications policy. The e-government initiative is still moving forward, and the Ministry of Education has established an ICT committee as part of their new Sector-Wide Approach.

Business, however, has neither been consulted to any great degree, nor has it shown much desire to work collectively. The Vanuatu IT Users Society works hard at fostering discussion in these areas, but it does so with little if any material assistance from outside.

This must change. We don’t need a worker’s paradise-style central committee to manage everyone’s lives, but we do at least need a little more formal cooperation, and in a few key locations, a mandate to require that Vanuatu’s ICT priorities are being addressed.

Most people assume that as a geek, I see technology as a Good Thing, one of the miracles of the modern age. That’s not always the case.

The professional life of an ICT professional is fraught with dangers. They’re not personal dangers, of course. There are few safer things to do than plunking down in front of a computer for several hours each day. The risks a geek faces are risks of responsibility. Every choice we make has implications, some of which can be quite serious, especially in places where resources are limited.

It’s easy to get lost in the technical details. It’s easy to forget that our work is about communications first, and technology second. We can express it any way we like, but nothing we do has any meaning until we remember that our job is helping people talk to people.

That said, computers are complex – the most complex apparatus ever designed for day-to-day use. They require nearly unimaginable hours of effort to render them usable to the average person, at work or at home. (People are pretty complex, too.)

To put things in perspective: If you put a mechanic into a garage full of all the components required to build a truck, she could build one herself. It might take some time, perhaps even months, but eventually a fully constructed vehicle would emerge. Depending on the mechanic’s skills, that truck could be expected to stay on the road for quite some time.

On the other hand, if you put a computer technician into a room with all the physical components required to build a computer, chances are the technician would never manage to make anything more than a simple adding machine, no matter how long you left them there. This is because computers are not machines – not in the traditional sense, anyway.

Computers are systems. And such systems are only possible when vast numbers of people cooperate, each one contributing his or her knowledge and skill to the collective goal of having a useful information sharing device. Engineers, programmers, technicians, administrators, friends and volunteers all have to give their time. Each one takes up the bits of information contributed by others and does a little bit more with them, tweaking this bit or that until the computer is more useful than it was before.

Truly, a computer is like a sand castle, built by countless people, each tossing a few grains here, moving a few grains there. What is miraculous about it is not that the grains are so tiny, but that the castle that we’ve built with them is so immense that we can live inside it, wandering through it almost endlessly. The complexity of computers and the information they process daily is already well beyond the comprehension of most people.

What happens when we take this immensely complicated machine and inject it into day-to-day life in Vanuatu? It’s tempting to say that the complexity of computers will clash with the simplicity of village life, but that’s not true. Oh, there’s sure to be a clash, but assuming that village life is simple is a dangerous mistake.

Vanuatu culture is a dense and richly woven fabric of dependencies, influences and counterweights. It’s doubtful whether any expat, this author included, correctly gauges its complexity.

The problem that technology poses, therefore, needs to be seen differently. The picture we often have is of an ocean of information washing over the ‘simple’ ni-Vanuatu villages in much the same way the King tides wash over the islands of Tuvalu every year. But that’s neither accurate nor useful. Vanuatu society is not a fixed point, immovable and subject only to erosion, salvageable only by the construction of an immense sea wall. It would be more useful to view it as a deep, slow current rising to touch the turbulence on the surface, each one affecting the other.

Every good mariner knows that a lifetime of study is required to be able to navigate the flow when tides converge. Riding this current requires skilled hands at the helm and an experienced eye on the water.

A captain entering such waters for the first time will make every effort to ensure that the charts are up to date, that the crew is alert and awake, and will even take on a pilot in particularly tricky spots. But there’s still no guarantee that the passage will be a safe one. Ultimately, it’s impossible to fight the ocean. You simply ride along, dodging this way or that when the opportunity presents itself.

ICT professionals are the chart-makers, the pilots and the helmsmen of the information world, but they are not usually the captains of any particular endeavour. Nor should they be, necessarily. They are the ones who sweat the details in order that the captain can negotiate a safe passage through dangerous waters.

Things don’t always go well. It’s often frustrating to see painstakingly detailed charts tossed aside by someone who sees only flat water. But the response to this is not necessarily to put more detail in the chart. Sometimes the right answer is to make sure the right person gets the chart in the first place. A good captain can survive a bad chart, but a bad captain won’t be better with a good one.

A bad captain will blame the chart because it didn’t tell him how the currents were going to behave. A good captain doesn’t try to predict what the water will do; rather he uses the charts to decide what to do when the tides take him.

The tide of global information is already in flood. It’s already mixing inextricably with the deep, dense current that is Vanuatu culture. It’s teasing at the edges, amplifying some parts and drowning others, muddying some parts that were once clear and clarifying others that were long obscured.

ICT professionals in Vanuatu face a real challenge. They’re plotting a course through waters that nobody’s seen before, there are too few of them to fully crew the ship and, as with all things, good captains are few and far between.

It’s not surprising that we’re ill-equipped for such a voyage. The same is true of most countries. Developed nations the world over have experienced immense turmoil as a result of the rise of information technology. But they’ve got one advantage: For better or for worse, they’ve been in turmoil long enough that they’ve come to accept it as the norm.

Few in the developed world question the cost of this rootless, fluid existence. Few here in Vanuatu would accept it, given the choice.

Those of us who work in technology – and that means all of us who work in development – need to lift our eyes from the numbers on the charts and ask ourselves: What is our destination, and what is the course? We can’t master the tide, because it has a life of its own. But we can try to be sure that, as each new surge and eddy catches us, we know which currents will pull us into the rocks and shoals and which will propel us toward our goal.

In the course of discussions about how to properly correct the record, two points kept recurring, both explicitly and implicitly: So-called ‘geeks’ often focus far too much on technology and not nearly enough on what it’s actually for. Additionally, there’s often a lot of talk – some might say too much talk – based on speculation. Making blithe assumptions can spell disaster for any project, but those with high-tech as a principle ingredient are even more prone to failure because of their inherent complexity.

Technology doesn’t come cheap. It’s generally true that properly functioning technical systems are cheaper than the alternatives, but getting those systems to run properly is often what geeks call ‘a non-trivial task.’ A computer is one of the most complex human inventions ever created for everyday use. Making dozens or hundreds of them work together doesn’t just add to this complexity, it multiplies it.

In the typical ICT-related project, time is short, planning is not detailed enough and although intentions are always good, there’s often not enough to time to obsess over all the possible outcomes. The usual result is that these projects reach an ‘OOPS’ moment, in which people realise that the best-laid plans of mice and modems oft go awry. Sometimes it’s possible to recover from the error gracefully, sometimes it’s painful, and sometimes there’s just no escaping the need to step back and try again.

So the odds of getting things at least a little wrong are usually high, and the cost of failure is sometimes quite high indeed. Not a very auspicious starting point for something that’s often touted as the answer to all our communication needs, is it?

Now let’s consider the plight of the average IT staff. They’re tasked with keeping everything running, keeping abreast of the latest advances, planning for tomorrow, and above all trying to make it all comprehensible to people who don’t have all day to study technology. Any one of those tasks can be a full-time job.

It’s a truism that technology moves quickly. Every day brings new and often unpredictable occurrences, inventions and trends. Computer users’ needs change constantly, hardware capabilities and specifications never stay put, new software appears overnight, like mushrooms on… fertile ground.

It’s understandable, therefore, if there’s a natural inclination among IT people to limit the scope of their work to what they consider to be essential. It’s a skill that gets learned early on in the technology game, and becomes hard to unlearn. Things change so much, so fast, that talking through the implications of every course of action can seem almost pointless.

Unfortunately, it’s not optional.

Computers are nothing more than the medium through which people communicate. The extent to which they play nice with one another defines how easily we can exchange information of all kinds. Technology, in other words, deals primarily with how we communicate, but it’s up to us to determine the what and the why. If we don’t answer that first technical question, though, the other more important questions become moot.

Just as no man is an island unto himself, in this day and age, no computer stands alone. While it may be frustrating and time-consuming to chew over every technical detail for every bit of technology, endlessly considering different scenarios and approaches, there really is no practical alternative. It was to this end, for example, that the VIGNET mailing list was created. There are many others like it, but this one is ours.

Developing a community of practice in which people can share their insights, experience and opinions is a key asset in trying to cope with the ocean of information that IT professionals swim in every day. It gives people the opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes, to benefit from alternative views and ultimately to ensure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

Technology decisions are never taken in a vacuum. The technological choices that one person makes have both direct and indirect impact on the choices others make. Some of these impacts are intentional, some are not. Putting one’s work out in the open and talking things through is one way to avoid the worst. Basically, it’s like pooling the spare processing cycles of numerous computers in order to solve a very complex problem. What might take hours on a single processor takes only minutes when the task is split into morsels and processed by a whole bunch of them.

Of course, humans are not computers. This means that a public forum is a decidedly imperfect place. There are sometimes misunderstandings, priorities don’t always align, digressions and plain old silliness sometimes divert us from our work. It’s an imperfect process, but it’s the best available at this point in time.

Everyone benefits from a free and open exchange about information, communications, and the technology we use to achieve it. Mistakes and misunderstandings may happen, but they can be resolved with a little patience and a little more talk.