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Recently I attended my first Live in HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s das Rheingold. I’m not exactly a Ringhead, but I’ve always enjoyed the Ring Cycle, in particular because of its attention to the theme of how power corrupts people. This is, of course, one of the main themes of political narrative. Das Rheingold, to be sure, focuses almost exclusively on it.

The performance blew me away. I was impressed by the powerful sound, by the sustained close-ups of the soloists, and by Robert Lepage’s imaginative production. Because das Rheingold uses very little chorus close-ups of soloists work well. And the set was very effective at presenting events occurring at different spatial levels, as well as serving as a backdrop for projected images.

I came away from it thinking about the difference between witnessing a live production and witnessing a Live in HD broadcast. Tickets for live in HD are a lot less expensive and, at least for this production of this opera, it gives you a much closer view than any seat at a live performance. I don’t expect that Live in HD would cut into the Met’s sales, and indeed there are Live in HD presentations in New York City. (This differs from the standard practice in many sporting events of blacking out broadcasts within the immediate vicinity).

I wondered, however, if the Live in HD performances of the Met wouldn’t cut into the market for regional opera companies. I posed this question to my co-authors of Digital State at the Leading Edge, and received a detailed and thoughtful reply from Perri 6 that made 3 points. First, people go to live performances to interact with other members of the audience and for the interaction between performers and audience, the latter especially if the audience is small and the performance space intimate. Second, close-up may not be the best way of enjoying a performance. Third, while the sound in Live in HD is powerful, it is mixed and blended by the production team, and is likely different from the sound in different places in the hall. Someone may buy a particular seat in the hall because they prefer the sound as heard in that location. The general consensus of my colleagues was that the experiences are sufficiently different that the Met’s Live in HD will not kill regional opera.

The next Met Live in HD performance I’m going to is John Adams’s Nixon in China on February 12. It turns out that the Canadian Opera Company is doing 8 performances of Nixon in China between February 5 and 26 and the Met an encore performance on March 12. This serendipitous quirk of scheduling has provided what economists would call a natural experiment.

Contrast the two Nixons. For Live in HD you get close-up camera work and powerful, perhaps overpowering, sound. Let’s also give the edge in quality to the Met for the same reason the Yankees usually do better in the AL East than the Blue Jays. Tickets cost $25 and you see it in borderline-grubby Cineplex cinemas usually in shopping malls.

For the Canadian Opera Company you get the in-person experience that Perri raves about. You also get a chance to dress up and see and be seen, something that has always been part of opera-going. (My compliments to the ad agency that does Cialis commercials for one that cleverly refers to the performance before the performance.) Single tickets cost between $70 and $317, though I imagine there are less expensive package deals and youth discounts.

If we were considering the impact of Live in HD broadcasts on the COC’s live performances, there are a number of things we’d like to find out. How many tickets did each sell and how many seats were empty? The Live in HD broadcasts are presented in multiple screens in the greater Toronto area, so its two performances could still amount to quite a few seats.

I could imagine a questionnaire posed to the patrons of each. Were you aware that the other way of watching the opera was available? If you were aware, why did you choose this one? Are you seeing both the COC live and the Met’s Live in HD (to pick up the real hard-core John Adams fans)? In general, do you go to both COC live and the Met’s Live in HD? If you’ve ever been to both, what do you like about each and dislike about each?

Without proprietary information about the audience (held by the COC and Cineplex) a telephone survey wouldn’t be possible. I suppose the most feasible way to implement such a survey would be to distribute it at the door. That of course, would require some funding and some research assistants – dressed down at the cinema and dressed to the nines at the opera – to hand out the questionnaires.

With less than three months, it would likely be difficult to find funding. And that’s unfortunate, because I think these are fascinating and important questions about the relationship between traditional live performance and a new technologically-enabled alternative.

During the 1993-94 academic year, as a visiting professor at the Kennedy School and resident faculty member at Quincy House, I discovered facebook. At the start of the year, the house published its facebook: a softcover booklet with pictures of and biographical information about all the students there, as well as lists showing the students by categories such as roommate groups, first names, birthdays, home towns, and majors. I thought it was a great way of helping the students connect with one another, and evidence of what I found was a much more friendly and caring attitude on the part of the College than when I was an undergrad there in the late 60s.

Flash forward to 2003. Most of the houses’ facebooks are now online, and Harvard’s more entrepreneurial computer geeks are thinking about how to join them up into a college-wide facebook and then scale up from there. And I’m sure there were students at other universities with facebooks working on the same idea.

Such was the origin of the renowned social networking website Facebook, as chronicled in Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and the Fincher-Sorkin movie The Social Network. I just saw the movie, and liked it very much, in particular because the creators used a very clever narrative strategy.

In The West Wing, Sorkin privileged dialogue over plot, emphasizing policy wonk speak about a set of issues in play, and often unresolved, in any given episode. In The Social Network, Sorkin didn’t try to recreate computer geek speak, which would have left most of the audience baffled. The plot structure revolved around two conflicts, the one between Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerberg and the brothers Winkelvoss about whether he had stolen their idea, and the other between Zuckerberg and his initial partner Eduardo Saverin and the validity of the agreement forcing the latter out of the company. The two conflicts are conflated in a legal deposition-taking, so that the history of Facebook unfolds in flashbacks, with the conflicts portrayed as they happened and then discussed by the protagonists afterwards. This approach has stimulated considerable critical and audience discussion about which of the conflicting parties were justified in either a legal or a moral sense. It is a great example of narrative multi-vocality, conflicting stories presented in a given text.

Thinking about the movie has led me to formulate (at least as a first cut) an entrepreneurial narrative genre, which I’ll describe in terms of both the players and events. The genre’s hero is the entrepreneur, the person who has a new idea and attempts to put it into practice.

One important issue is the entrepreneur’s motivation. Is (s)he doing it for intrinsic reasons, namely to realize an idea and make the world take notice? Is (s)he trying to get rich, particularly if there is a family to support? In Zuckerberg’s case, there was no family and, initially at least, money didn’t seem to matter to him. The intrinsic satisfaction and subsequent renown from building the best social networking site did. The film also makes clear that, in the company of women, he was an aspie-loser-geek, so doing something so impressive that a Victoria’s Secret model would gladly show him her secrets was an important motivator.

Competition is an important element of the entrepreneurial fable. Smart people (for example Newton and Leibniz on calculus) are simultaneously working on the same problem, and entrepreneurship is often a race against the competition for first mover advantage. So Zuckerberg was competing against the Winkelvossim, whom he had contact with, and all the other social networking entrepreneurs at Harvard and elsewhere whom he didn’t have contact with, but whom he knew were also trying to scale up their facebooks.

The mentor is another key character. In Zuckerberg’s case, the mentor was Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who held out to Zuckerberg the attractions of Silicon Valley, in particular access to the leading VCs, as well as the lifestyle that attracted the Victoria’s Secret models (though Zuckerberg was more interested in the sex than the drugs). Parker didn’t remain a mentor for long, but he was in the right place at the right time.

If Parker was in the right place at the right time, cofounder Eduardo Saverin wasn’t. When Zuckerberg went to the Valley for Facebook’s first summer, Saverin stayed in New York. When Zuckerberg, with Parker’s help, could see that venture capital funding was the way forward, Saverin visited the salons and even pounded the streets of New York trying, without much success, to sell advertising. Saverin represents the initial partner who doesn’t understand the company’s evolving opportunities and strategic direction, and who is thus left behind.

So the archetypal story is that the entrepreneur gets the idea and starts to work on making it into a product or service. Along the way, (s)he finds the resources, fights off the competition, benefits from the advice of a mentor, dumps the clueless partner, and realizes the entrepreneurial dream. My hypothesis is that this pattern fits the first chapter of many other entrepreneurial narratives (Microsoft, Apple). But that remains to be demonstrated.

Now that I’ve actually used the Nexus kiosks on a quick trip to Boston, I have three more things to say.

First, one of my readers mentioned that he applied to the Canadian Government and received his card in 4 weeks, which was a week or two faster than my application to the US Government. The US program is more convenient – completely on line – and less expensive ($50, rather than $80) but the Canadian program delivers faster. Take your choice.

Second, the kiosk was easy to use. A female voice – call her Iris – tells you how to position yourself so that the iris recognition camera gets a good picture. I wore my very soft and flexible bifocal contact lenses, which are a pale blue and have the numbers “123″ printed lightly to help the wearer ensure that they are not inside out, and Iris still had no trouble recognizing my irises.

The third point concerns the economics of the Nexus program. In a competitive market, the long run cost of production should equal the value of the product to the marginal user. The Nexus program, of course (or at least we should hope) is a monopoly, so the relevant question is what it should charge. As it now stands, for $50 you get the cost of the application (processing your information, an in-person interview, and the production of a high-tech RFID card) as well as 5 years’ use of the kiosks to short-circuit immigration queues going into the US or returning to Canada from anywhere.

That strikes me as a great bargain. Likely $ 50 doesn’t even cover the cost of the application process, making some allowance for contributing to the cost of the technology. Yes Nexus does reduce the operating costs of the Canada Border Services Agency and US Customs and Border Protection by diverting trusted travelers from the their agents’ queues, but how much cost saving would that diversion represent?

In a world where both the Canadian and US governments will be looking for ways to increase user fees to reduce the deficit, I can’t imagine that they won’t target Nexus. Conclusion: get your Nexus card while it’s still a great deal.

I travel to the US fairly frequently and, as a result of the lengthy delays after the foiled terrorist incident last December 25, I decided to join the Nexus program. Nexus is a voluntary program in which travelers who are qualified and willing to provide an iris scan can avoid lineups at both Canada and US immigration. They do this by checking in at an electronic kiosk that does an iris scan and matches it with the data on record.

When I googled Nexus, the first two sites that came up were immigration consultants who will handle the process for you. One charges $157 for enrolment in 6-8 weeks and $ 262 for enrolment in 1- 3 weeks. Thank you, I’d rather do it myself.

Since Nexus is a joint program of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the US Department of Homeland Security, one can enroll through either. The process involves completing and submitting an application form and then, if the application is approved, going to an interview to have the iris scan. It turns out that enrolment through the Department of Homeland Security costs $50 US and can be done entirely online through the DHS Government Online Enrolment System (GOES) while enrolment through CBSA involves downloading the form and then submitting it in the mail and costs $80 Canadian. Cost and convenience trumped national identification, and I enrolled in GOES.

The GOES online application was easy to complete, with a form that was clear and a helpful error-correction function at the end. The entire process can then be handled online through the GOES website. I received an email informing me that my application had been accepted 2 ? weeks after I submitted it, and I was then able to book an interview at Pearson Airport two weeks later. My Nexus card came 2 weeks after the interview. The entire process took 7 weeks, with no consultant fee. I could have completed it a week or two faster, had I been able to make the first available interview.

All told, my conclusion is that the GOES system provided excellent service. As a Canadian, I was very disappointed, if not embarrassed, that the Canada Border Services Agency is still stuck in the paper age and doesn’t provide comparable service. And I hope this blog finds its way to both DHS and CBSA.

In my co-authored book Digital State at the Leading Edge (www.digitalstate.org), my co-authors and I accepted the consulting firm Accenture’s claim that the Government of Canada was at the world’s leading edge in providing eGovernment services. In this particular case of a precisely-matched program, it is clear that the Americans are ahead. Of course, a broader based study would be required to see if that is the case in other areas of online service delivery. But people make inferences from their personal circumstances. In this instance, the US has the online goods, and Canada doesn’t.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a paper entitled Digital State 2.0 reviewing the major developments in the use of IT in Canadian politics and government between 2006 and 2009. It is being published in a festschrift – due for release any day now – in honour of the retirement of the eminent public administration scholar G. Bruce Doern.

I’ve been asked to contribute a paper to another edited book about IT in politics and government, so I will be looking at developments during the last year to update the previous paper under the new rubric of Digital State 2.5. Here is my plan for the new paper.

In the area of IT in politics, the main driver of change is general elections. In Digital State 2.0, I referred to the federal election of 2008, Ontario election of 2007, and – because it represented such a transformative change – the US election of 2008. There haven’t been elections in any of these jurisdictions, so there is little to update. I will, however, have a look at the mid-mandate sniping going on among the major parties in the federal and Ontario governments, in particular online attempts by the Liberals to demonize Stephen Harper and online attempts by the Conservatives to trivialize Michael Ignatieff.

Economic recovery has been a key government priority, which will lead to an examination of the online presence for the federal government’s Economic Action Plan (www.actionplan.gc.ca). Its natural comparator will be the US government’s website for the Economic Recovery Act (www.recovery.gov). It appears that the US site is both more detailed in the information made available and less partisan in how it presents it.

The management of large IT projects is always a major concern, and in the last year we have had one that has gone seriously off the rails, namely Ontario’s eHealth initiative. Claims of project mismanagement have led to the resignations of the Project Manager, Chairman of eHealth Ontario, Deputy Minister and Minister of Health. Forensic analysis of troubled IT projects is a complicated matter, and it’s not clear to me that the official analysis has been completed, but I’ll try to say something about the causes and state of play.

The many facets of social networking referred to as Web 2.0 continue to be evolving in the public sphere as well. While outside the geographic purview of my article, I couldn’t help but laugh at a recent article in the New York Times by Scott Sayare about how the gaffes of French politicians, including even M. le President, are being caught digitally and circulated on YouTube.

More substantial is the US Government’s initiative to make public sector data widely available to applications developers on www.data.gov. The background here is that Washington DC did this and received considerable public recognition, including winning a prestigious Innovations in American Government Award in 2009. Vivek Kundra, Washington, DC’s chief technology officer has jumped up two levels of government by moving around the block to become the US Government’s CIO. Thus the US Government is virtually overnight scaling up a local initiative, and the results will be fascinating to see.

Looking back at what I’ve just written, the title of the book that started this line of research comes to mind: Digital State at the Leading Edge. In the book, we were referring to the Government of Canada. No longer. I think that honour now goes to the US. Stay tuned for more in coming weeks and months.

I’ll be taking the next two weeks off posting, and I’ll be back in early January. Happy holidays and best wishes for the new year to all.