Category Archives: wonk

Town and Country

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

It’s axiomatic that in our so-called Information Society, improving communications is synonymous with improving people’s quality of life. Easier access to information is generally accepted as a good thing.

Far be it from me to gainsay the truisms that keep me in pocket money. But I do enjoy being wrong.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my time here in Vanuatu is that trends and patterns are not so universal as they sometimes seem. Things that are self-evident elsewhere in the world should not be taken for granted here. Society, geography, economy and a few dozen other differentiating factors make Vanuatu unique in important ways.

Received wisdom, even from the leading lights of development theory, often does more damage than good if it’s not leavened with a solid grounding in local conditions. And that’s why I’ve been waiting with bated breath for an upcoming report by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) on the social effects of mobile telephony in Vanuatu.

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What Lies Ahead?

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

Recently we’ve seen a bit of a lull in activity (or at least excitement) in the Vanuatu telecommunications sector. Customers are becoming a little blasé about choice in the mobile market. The mobile telephone incumbents have more or less established their positions, with TVL making real efforts to smoothe its complexion and Digicel allowing the first small warts to peep through its make-up.

The post-election transition of power slowed the policy process down some, and movements at the executive level meant that some of the local businesses needed a bit of a breather as well.

So let’s take this opportunity to do a little crystal ball gazing. What can businesses and Internet users generally expect in the coming months?

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The Price of Freedom

Australia’s Labour government recently announced that they would be implementing a two-tiered, national content-filtering scheme for all Internet traffic.  The proposal as it stands is that people will have a choice of Internet connections: The first will block all Internet content considered unsafe for children. The second will allow adult content, but block anything deemed illegal under Australian law. People can choose one or the other, but they must choose one.

As with all public content-filtering schemes, this idea is well-intentioned, but fatally flawed.

National content filtering is an inefficient and fundamentally faulty technical approach that deputises the nation’s Internet Service Providers to the role of neighbourhood sherriff, something they’re not at all comfortable with. Second, and more importantly, it creates a dangerous legal and moral precedent that is difficult to distinguish from the infamous Great Firewall of China, which is regularly used to stifle social and political dissent.

Indeed, a spokesman for the online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia recently said, “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”

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Form and Function

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

[Yes, it’s a re-hash of this rant. ed.]

As a computer geek, I’m supposed to be suffused with enthusiasm and excitement over the features of the latest software. By rights, I should be the one carrying the techno-tablets down from the mountain, telling you how the latest in frobnalising ephemetry is going to change everyone’s life. I’m the one supposed to show you where to sign up and what to do with it once you’ve got it.

I have a confession to make: I hate most software.

90% of software is crap. As author Theodore Sturgeon famously said, that’s because 90% of everything is crap.

I save a particular loathing for word processors. For any but the simplest tasks, their interfaces are utterly ridiculous. I haven’t liked a word processing interface since WordPerfect circa version 5, which ran on DOS (remember DOS?). If I had my own way, I’d still be using it.

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Masters in our own House?

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Economic hardship is expressed in the simplest terms in Vanuatu. The price of rice, of diesel and cooking gas, the selling price of copra and kava – all of these hit closest to home. The most pressing question facing our new government is how best to insulate Vanuatu from the worst of the economic turmoil affecting the world’s economies.

The question for all ni-Vanuatu is how to hold the new government to account.

Economists describe Vanuatu’s position as that of a ‘price taker’. In layman’s terms that means we don’t get much of a say in how prices are set. OPEC members have never heard of us, and are content to keep it that way. Commodity exchanges deal in volumes that give Vanuatu no more say over prices than a corner shopkeeper.

Nonetheless, government decisions echo throughout the local economy. It’s limited in what it can do, but what it does affects us directly.

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Spit and a Handshake

Horse traders in Ireland famously spit into their palms before shaking hands to seal a deal. A great deal of spitting goes on in Vanuatu-style horse trading, but it’s almost all kava-induced.

Almost all.

The political scene here is small enough that everyone knows each other. In some cases, this acquaintance borders on respect, even camaraderie. But in a few cases, familiarity has bred a special kind of contempt. As potential coalition line-ups are considered, the question, often enough, is which players are capable of sitting together in the same room long enough to agree about anything.

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All the Young Turks

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

How the mighty have fallen. As Vanuatu counts the votes from Tuesday’s election, it’s becoming increasingly evident that some of the figures who have dominated the political scene in Vanuatu since Independence are falling by the wayside.

In my last column, I argued that policy and principle had suffered such neglect in recent years that Vanuatu voters had turned inward, trading their votes for the most direct and straightforward rewards. Saucepans and bags of rice had become the currency of the electorate, because promises never came to anything. A week later, we appear to be witnessing the demise of some of the strongest proponents of this practice.

According to some, that’s not entirely good news.

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First election results

The very first election results are starting to trickle in. They’re very preliminary, incomplete and subject to change.

This is gossip, not reporting.

Final Update: Okay, it’s time to call it a day on this thread. I’ve been cross-referencing sources all over town, and the only thing that’s clear is that nothing is clear. The electoral office is not releasing numbers, and until they do there’s just too much inaccuracy – some of it certainly agenda-driven – to rely on at all. I won’t suggest you completely disregard what lies below; just take it all with a bucketful of salt.

(Update: Note that this page seems to contradict the previous. Ralph’s site was down just a little while ago, so they might have reverted to an earlier version to get the site back online. One source told me that they kept updating until late into the night, but ultimately left off. I take this to mean that his site is not at all accurate at the moment. Only goes to show that everything we say about the results at this stage is nearly pure speculation.)

(‘Nother update: I’ve talked to a few more people, and though minor details vary, the numbers in the first link appear to be indicative of the situation, if not perfect in detail. Candidate names, as compared with three other sources, seem to be more or less correct, and increasingly complete. Just got feedback from someone who’s a bit of an authority on this stuff, and apparently there are some significant discrepancies in the list above. Unfortunately, there is no canonical site for this, and little authoritative information online anywhere. That doesn’t change much of the prognostication below, however.)

(September 4, 08:00: Updated yet again to reflect new information and comments below.)

As the passing of a single day has shown, it’s remarkably easy to be wrong about even larger details. This article is starting to look like wikipedia in the middle of an edit war, but I’ll not be removing details, no matter how embarrassing to me. I feel that this is the best testament to the fluidity of the situation, and perhaps the most persuasive argument possible for greater transparency and information sharing.

My back-of-the-napkin analysis is getting rather long-winded, but I’m not (yet) willing to split it out into separate posts, so I’ll push it below a cut. Many more details follow….

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