Cory Ondrejka
Fellow, Network Culture Project
USC Annenberg
Cory Ondrejka is the co-creator of Second Life, where he architected the core code and hired the team responsible for Second Life's growth to over 12 million residents. The ecosystems he helped create led directly to the success of Second Life, as well as the ongoing use of Second Life as a platform for music, education, and business. Before Linden Lab, Ondrejka traveled an eclectic path from the US Naval Academy and nuclear power to defense contracting and video game development. More recently, he served as Executive Vice President of Global Digital Marketing and Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy for EMI Music, and was a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where he taught a course on online communities and coordinated the MacArthur-grant driving research for the Public Diplomacy and Network Culture Project.
Exhibition Keynote Address:
Open and Agile: Accelerating Change and Institutional Incompetence
The first decade of the 21st century has been a period of rapid change across media, technology, telecommunications, and education. The next decade is going to move even faster and undoubtedly questions will arise such as:
> How can government institutions avoid irrelevance as the rest of the world builds on the increasing power and connections available to them?
> What lessons from product development need to be applied more broadly in our connected world?
This is a highly interactive address - your questions are encouraged.