Engineers Without Borders - Group, Liaison or nothing ?

[Gary Conkol]

I have two ideas I would like to take action on here, if there is agreement or interest.

1) MER should form a technical group to facilitate communication, ideas, and collaboration and other activities between members and others who want to help out by providing ideas, mentoring, technical review, or project work for EWB or any of the other foundations and help agencies. Many of these agencies have specific technical needs or services where SME members can provide valuable help. Agencies like Habitat for Humanity, IESC (Middle East), CDC (Asia), CRDF (former Soviet Union), and others commonly include engineers in their work. Many SME members have similar experience and it occurred to me that such a group could help concentrate on the manufacturing aspects of these projects and draw from the wealth of knowledge available in SME. It would also be a nice press piece for the SME organization

2) EWB initially grew out of the educational community because of all the student interest and project work. MER can serve a very useful function here by highlighting the universities where this type of work is going on and help through their Technical Advisory Groups (TAC) and liaison work. As a member of EWB I would be happy to take this on and help liaison here with the objective to leverage human resources to mutual benefit. Sometimes a little bit of work goes a long way. I ask all the others on this e-mail who are members of EWB and universities where there are active projects for EWB and others to come forward with their experiences and ideas.