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This requires taking a step back and looking at the decision making scene as a whole, with all lobby groups and grey eminences, internal party politics and influence of mass-media and public. Particularly, this requires:

Getting a clear map of who are the key players on policy making scene, and what are the power relations
Identifying potential supporters and linking with them, establishing channels of effective information exchange with them and rapidly working on pushing common agenda
Following closely the development on policy making scene, in order not to miss new potential allies or other important dynamics.
Involvement in discussions on spaces where opponents present their finding and views

Tools and Usages	Potentials	Limitations	Examples
Online diagram drawing applications Gliffy.com (need to find a free alternative)	Useful to have a visual overview of complex relations (e.g. among specific stakeholders, their spheres of influence, etc). Possible to build collaboratively online with others
Online mind mapping applications like http://bubbl.us or http://www.mindomo.com (a lot more complex)	Similar usage as above but allowing more complex schemas. Possibility to link graphs to more complex information, possibility to capture relations as meta-data that can be exported, etc.	Steeper learning curve than in case of tools designed only for generating visual schemes. Might be more complex then what is needed in most cases where a simple snapshot overview of a situation is needed.

Strategy: Identify potential supporters and link with them

Tools and Usages	Potentials	Limitations	Examples
Social bookmarking tools, such as Diigo^[1], Delicious or Blogmarks – Find people who book the same issue as you do
Google Scholar Google's search service allowing to search within academic journals and legal documents.	A possibility to find valuable academic resources, as well as other researchers working on the same issue.		Example of a search result for terms "Políticas TIC" and Uruguay: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Pol %C3%ADticas+TIC %22+Uruguay&btnG=Sea rc h&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo =&as_vis=0
Blog aggregators, such as Technorati	Technorati aggregates posts from thousands of blogs. Searching on Technorati for terms related to specific policy issue can help us to identify people who blog about the issue
Google Blogs Google Blogs allows user to find blogs on specific topics.
Social Networking tools, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others – find groups concerned with the same issue as you are
Social media scanners scanning conversations on selected social networks for predetermined keywords. UberVU,	Allows us to be informed about ongoing discussions on specific topics, and eventually link with people involved in these discussions. UberVU provides alerts when specific keywords are mentioned.	UberVU is a paid service	Search on key terms “polítícas” and “TICs” (results limited because of a cost-free type of search): http://www.ubervu.com/pol%C3%ADticas+tic/social-media/

Strategy: Follow closely the development on policy making scene

Tools and Usages	Potentials	Limitations	Examples
Content syndication tools, such as RSS or Atom feeds' readers. Bloglines and Netvibes are two of the most popular online feed aggregators
Tag aggregators such as Flickr (Mainly for images)	Tag aggregators help us to find content that is specifically “labelled” by terms (tags) that we are searching for.
Alerts from sites/pages when content is added - Tools like Versionista or Change Alert	Can be used to monitor sites of stakeholders in policy making processes. Versionista allows to monitor entire receive e-mail alerts when changes that meet specific regular expressions are made.
Online calendars, such as Google Calendar Desktop applications using online calendar feeds (MS Outlook calendar, Mozilla ThunderbirdThunderbird calendar, and many others)	Most modern sites and blogs which feature some type of calendar of events offer sharing the calendar through a standard calendar feed. Such feed can be imported to a Googgle Calendar or a desktop calendar application, exported into most mobile devices, etc. Planed events published by many different sources (e.g. gvt or municipal offices) can thus be displayed in a single calendar, they can be further shared, etc.