CSCW Blog

We are delighted to announce the two keynote speakers for the upcoming CSCW conference 8-12 Nov 2008 in San Diego, CA, USA.

The conference opening speaker will be Cory Ondrejka, cofounder of Second Life, the hugely successful virtual environment. He architected the core code and created the team responsible for Second Life's growth to over 12 million residents. He is an authority on the development and use of virtual worlds in game, entertainment, education, government, military, and business applications. In addition, Cory is an expert on the complex interrelation between innovation and learning, as well as the technological and social requirements of product development across entangled, geographically dispersed teams.

The closing speaker will be Sara Diamond, the President of the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Canada’s foremost university of art and design. Prior to OCAD, she was the Director of Research for the prestigious Banff Centre where she created the renowned Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) built on alliances between artists, designers, architects, scientists, social scientists, and international and Canadian businesses.

These speakers exemplify the breadth and depth of topics that the CSCW community explores in the quest to understand and amplify human-to-human collaboration. Please join them at the conference for invigorating discussions on the topics of computer-mediated collaboration, coordination, communication and competition.

To kick off the conference a little early, please leave comments with questions you would like to have asked of each speaker.

-Bo and David