Lisa Petrides is President and Founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a non-profit educational research institute located in Half Moon Bay, CA. Her research and writing is at the forefront of innovation in how education can be made relevant to learning through open source, social learning, information sharing, and knowledge collaboration. This includes over $7 million of grant-sponsored research and development including the award winning OER Commons initiative, an open source teaching and learning network that facilitates the discovery and reuse of open educational resources, as well as an international "best of breed" event dedicated to catalyzing education innovation, the Big Ideas Fest.

A former professor at Columbia University, Teachers College, and a post-doc fellow at the Educational Testing Service, she has the great fortune to travel across the globe giving keynotes, lectures, and counsel to open education advocates and aspirants, and to those who desire to foster the use of data, the sharing of information, or the creation of knowledge-based ecologies focused on learning in K-20 environments.