I think many or most of those professors will associate OSE with spam.  Spreading the word by email is a reasonable approach, but should be done colleague to colleague or friend to friend.  Writing to strangers seems rude to me.

- Mark Norton

Networking is fine and I agree we should spread the word to interested professors.  You have the right idea - contacting professors - but I really don't think we should broadcast it out.  Rather, use our existing next to to contact professors they know.  Spam is rarely welcome and those who are uninterested will be left with a bad impression of us.

- Mark

Thanks Josh...nice to know that OSE is not overly square.

A good strategy would be to contact the Engineers Without Borders club of the universities. This would be a good place to find a lot of enthusiasm that could spread to other faculty members or students.

I remember when I was taking my senior project class that a couple of people visited in the beginning of the semester from companies that were looking for teams. We had one from IBM and another from the Navy. If someone had proposed one of the GVSC at that time, I would of latched onto that. A good strategy would be to find an interested students or professors and get them familiar enough with OSE to give a short talk about it in the senior project seminars at the beginning of a semester when a lot of teams haven't picked projects. Or if you could maybe find someone in OSE and get them to go if they are close.

Mechanical, Electrical, and Chemical engineers would be good candidates. They have the advantage of some industry connections and expert advice from their advisers. My group was able to get $400 dollars worth of free parts for our project because of a connection my professor had. Another group got a $1000. The Navy group got a lot more than that, but with strings attached.

Another advantage of focusing on senior projects is that they are required to at least present what they were able to accomplish. More detail, even for familiar, always results in a better grade, which should advance the project. It could also be able to coordinate a lot of groups working on smaller pieces of one of the GVSC at different universities.

A lot of us were concerned was that the school or the sponsor would get
the patient rights to any of the good projects. That may be an issue at some schools.

@fitzsnaggle  Do all universities have this sort of club?

@DanielKey. Most tech universities and most universities with a engineering program have an Engineers without Borders group.

@Jiff64138  I couldn't help but notice you used the word "indiscriminately" and "large numbers of recipients".  Neither of these is true.  I'm aiming the same message at normally a group of about 6 professors at a university.  I do not have a program that i am using to bot-send these out in mass quantity, and I'm even changing the doctor's name in each email.  I don't think this qualifies as spam.

@danielkey That last of my message was just the definition of spam. Whether or not it is spam you will lower the likeliness to get a response by a factor of ten if the message seems canned. I have sent many personalized messages to other groups about the project so far and have had a near 100 percent response rate. ~ I have gmail I don't get spam; deleted automatically.

Ive never heard of engineers without borders.  But there are IEEE clubs at all the colleges I know of.  Not sure if there is a club like that for mech-Es.  There are also usually robotics clubs.

Prior to recently stumbling on this site, I thought I was alone in thinking widespread open source. I found this site when I was looking for an open source secondary battery. Being searchable on the net will help people like me find the message. We can all spend time on other forums (I do anyway) and post relevant links to this site that answer questions that people have of related problems. Forums are so popular that the message is sure to spread. Also, making this "cool" and appeal to youth is very important. Once the open source reverse trike is finalized, building them on a large scale could really boost the cool factor (especially if they are well built and clearly marked Open Source). I think it would also be a good idea for groups of people here to focus on specific projects and go through a site like http://www.kickstarter.com/ to raise funds and raise awareness.