Over a year ago we got the idea to internally send social media alerts for important Sunlight news and project launches. These email alerts consist of a collection of links to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that help our staff promote important news with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

It's quite simple: depending on the service, the link will populate a message that Sunlighter can share making it easy to post important information quickly.

Here's what those links might look like if I wanted to promote this blog post:

• Share on Twitter
• Post to Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Like on StumbleUpon
• Bookmark on Delicious

The url is populate with the required parameters and a link to the actual post, take a look:

• Share on Twitter - https://twitter.com/intent
  /tweet?text=RT+%40sunfoundation+Tools+for+Transparency%3A
  +Social+Media+Alerts+https%3A%2F%2Fbitly.com%2FpLPJQh+%23gov20+%23opengov
• Post to Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Share on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A//sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Like on StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8AKY4R/sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Bookmark on Delicious - http://delicious.com/save?url=http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts

This is by no means a comprehensive list of social media services and we often add other services, like Reddit or YouTube, while removing others. While participation is opt-in, it still helps us effectively promote Sunlight events.  What do you think? Do you have any ideas or tweaks we might use?

News aggregation services that use the vote-to-promote model like Reddit and Digg, and Delicious and StumbleUpon to a degree, are potentially very useful tools for finding and promoting fresh content in the fight for open government.  These tools are simple to use, easy to navigate and great for finding and adding further context.

Going one step further, promoting content on these services is almost a necessity. According to SEOMoz, Google considers positioning on sites like Digg, Delicious and Topsy as one of the many ranking signals used to determine the weight of search results.

The biggest challenge at the moment is getting users to actively populate these sites with transparency news and stories while also voting for and commenting on the content that they find.

There are a few ways we can begin fixing this problem; you can add a bookmarklet to your browser, like the ones from ShareThis or AddThis, to start submitting news items and adding share buttons to content, like we do at the bottom of our blog posts which allow you to share posts.

While Digg doesn't have a transparency category, though you can submit to Political News & Opinion, Reddit does.  I created a transparency category called Sunlight (/Transparency was taken but not in use) to begin aggregating open government news on Reddit.

You can also tag Delicious submissions with keywords like transparency and opengov or Twitter posts with related hashtags using # in front of the keyword.  Adding the appropriate tag to a post makes it easier to find related stories and services like Topsy use those tags and keywords to identify trending topics on Twitter.

These tools, when combined with the passionate people of the open government community, have the potential to be a powerful approach to moving the conversation forward.

Change.gov has released another ground-breaking feature.

This time, it's "Open for Questions", a digg-like feature for voting up questions for the administration-to-be.

Somewhat similar to the example set by the British mysociety.org, No. 10 Petitions, Open for Questions is part petition, part comment thread, and part internet press conference.  By allowing anyone to submit questions, and then allowing votes on the best questions to rise to the top, the transition team is experimenting with one answer to the question "What are you going to do with all of those comments?"

This is a real question, since the healthcare conversation, as of this writing, has racked up over 5,000 comments.  A reporter asked me today how one can possibly benefit from an overwhelming number of comments.  My answer was that it can be a challenge, especially as the response increases.  More important than initially designing a perfect system, though, is to experiment with what might work.  Expertise and knowledge are distributed throughout the country, and no matter how extensive the team's outreach efforts, tapping into all of the ideas is impossible.

Tools like Open for Questions are at least one step toward solving that problem, of creating more meaningful interaction between citizens and government.

As Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry wrote on TechPresident this morning,

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the lesson of the story is we collectively need much better tools for mass collaboration than we now have. How do we scale up relationships of trust and accountability? Are we bound by what our brains are capable of--face-to-face relationships with a few hundred peers at best? Or can we develop effective communications and reputation systems that would enable much larger groups to connect effectively?

While the answers won't always be obvious, addressing them can only happen through measured experimentation.  We're happy to see another step in that direction.