Ask HN: How do you contact experts when you are not “in the loop”?
I am part of a group of graduated students in Economics. The topic of our Master's Thesis is an experimental analysis on Enterprise Resource Planning software, similar to the one that has been developed by a paper from 2008 [1].
The fundamental piece of data for the analysis has to be collected from experts, so we followed the same protocol outlined in the paper and prepared a survey [2].
Unfortunately, since we don't know any ERP expert directly, we are struggling to find them. We tried on LinkedIn, but almost no one responded. Finding their email addresses seem nearly impossible, and contacting the ERP vendors wouldn't give us meaningful data as they would tend to undervalue costs and overvalue the advantages of their own solutions. We even tried on multiple "ERP Consultants" groups on Facebook, without any feedback.
We feel like we are at a dead end, but I wanted to ask here as perhaps we are missing some possible way to get in contact with the people that can answer the survey.
What do you do to contact experts? Is it only possible for people "in the sector", and outsiders are excluded?
Thanks in advance for any advice you can give us!
[1] https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/53451/86716_1.pdf [2] https://goo.gl/forms/9R7lJzRunzWkG71J2