In UseAt the core of Leadership for a New Era is a commitment to experiment with new ways of collaborating and partnering to achieve greater influence, spread innovations, and support one another to thrive and survive in a world of increasing complexity and an urgency to produce systems level changes. The Leadership for a New Era initiative creates a platform for exploration and experimentation that pushes the boundaries of how we have previously worked together as a learning community and raises new questions about how to collaborate and partner together for greater collective benefit. Below are some of the process questions we are grappling with. Please add other questions, and provide any thoughts and insights you have about the questions below. (To add your contribution simply click the EasyEdit button at the top of the page and start typing) Together we can generate new understandings to collectively advance all of our work.

What new platforms of collaboration can we create together that enable us to achieve greater influence, spread innovations, and support one another to thrive and survive in a world of increasing complexity and an urgency to produce systems level changes?

How do we unleash the potential of our network to generate innovative tools, approaches, and resources that are open source and accessible to everyone?

In a new era of collaboration, how are we redefining ownership, branding, and marketing in ways that advance the collective good?

What lessons are we learning from working together in new ways?

Resources (Please add resources that pushed your thinking on collaboration and partnership and provides practical value to others)

• Social Change with a Network Mindset (attached below), a report by the Monitor Institute as part of their Working Wikily 2.0 initiative (2009)
  

This report gives specific examples of how networks are building community, developing and sharing knowledge, aggregating and coordinating resources and services, organizing people and effort, and getting to scale by "working wikily" -- with openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making and distributed action.

• Platforms for Collaboration (attached below), an article by Satish Nambisan published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (Summer 2009)
  

Nambisian identifies three kinds of collaboration platforms: exploration, experimentation, and execution. The exploration platform helps us define core problems and connect with problem solvers. The experimentation platform helps us develop and test prototypes in real world contexts. The execution platform helps us build and disseminate templates and help adopters adapt to system wide changes.

• Collaboration Rules, an article by Phillip Evans and Bob Wolf published in the Harvard Business Review (July-Aug 2005)

This article describes how to build vibrant human networks. In short:

• Deploy pervasive collaborative technology
• Keep work visible
• Build communities of trust
• Think modularly
• Encourage teaming

This advice holds for those working in the for profit and nonprofit sectors.

• Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World (2008) by David Coleman and Stewart Levine

The goal of the book is to look at collaboration holistically, examining technology, process, people and their roles in successsful collaboration. The purpose of Part 1 is to examine the evolution of collaboration technologies and introduce cutting edge technologies that can drive business results. The purpose of Part II is to create communication awareness and present "bridge-building" tools, including how to prevent and quickly resolve disagreements.