I think what would work best with me are the following:
If you're in the very early stages, "Oh, I've been thinking about building a 3d printer." Basically this is a conversational gambit, not a request for a favor at all, and if I accept that gambit we can have a conversation about 3d printers in which I might tell you things that are useful to you.
If you have most of a requirements specification, "Hey, I'm planning on building a 3d printer. I know you know a lot about this stuff, would you mind looking over my overview? I have a printout here, or I can email it to you. Maybe we can get together for lunch on Saturday and you can tell me what you think?" I'd expect specific requests to work better than general ones if you're genuinely at a place where that's the specific concern you have; an arbitrarily chosen specific request in a field of equally significant problems will probably annoy me. That is, if you say "Yadda yadda, and I'm not sure how I want to think about scaling factors, what do you think?" and I look at your spec and my reaction is that scaling factors are the least of your worries, my instinct is to throw the spec against a wall.
If you have most of a design, the same strategy as above, though acknowledging that a design review is much more of an investment in time and attention. I would probably respond best to a design document that had both a high-level design and a detailed design, with the explicit understanding that if I don't choose to invest the time in a detailed design review I can just review the high-level design. Often, if the high-level design isn't crap, it will draw me into the details anyway.
In fact, the same pattern as above applies all the way through. The general principle here seems to be that I want evidence that you are actually putting effort into this, and are genuinely looking to me for assistance, rather than trying to manipulate me into doing the work for you.
From Crowdsourcing The Availabiliy Hueristic:
From Sympathetic Minds:
There's a lot more where that came from, but you get the point. Your social network could be the biggest, most valuable resource you have. I think we should spend more time and thought on strategies to optimize our social networks.
We have dabbled lightly in the importance of social skills, fashion, and so on, but I haven't seen discussion of *explicitly, strategically optimizing social networks*. If such discussion exists, please link me.
Anyways, after being hit by subtle hints like the above all through reading LW and other resources, and reading Dale Carnagie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, I have realized that I should work explicitly and strategically to optimize my social network. I think the rest of you are probably in the same boat, so we could all benefit from a good brainstorm on this topic.
Some Ideas:
Clubs. I belong to the local hackerspace, where technical-minded people hang out, talk about cool stuff, share ideas, help each other with projects, and share tools and resources. I also try to keep the local LW meetup in good repair, partially in the service of having a bunch of rationalist friends. I only just realized that the useful properties of these clubs probably apply to a good portion of possible clubs.
The useful property of clubs is that the relationships take drastically less overhead to maintain than more unstructured social networks. Instead of having to stay close to each friend individually, you hang out in a place where you end up dealing with them a lot, so you can get full benefit with way cheaper social bonds. Think of the difference between a bunch of objects individually tied together versus a bunch of objects in a bucket.
Being Valuable. When you give stuff to people, they feel obliged to give back. It might be a good idea to get that mutual help vibe going on in your social networks. When you have an interesting converstaion with someone, send them some relevent links afterwards. When you hear that someone has some interest, try to hook them up. Give people gifts, buy them lunch, etc. I don't know how effective this is at cultivating good relationships, but it's one of the major lessons in How to Win Friends and Influence People, and seems like it ought to work. It's also a nice thing to do that has benefits for your own well-being. Need more discussion and especially experimentation on this front.
Crowdsourcing. Be transparent; let everyone know what you are interested in, ask for help, etc. Need more experimentation to see what works and what doesn't, but wow what a good idea. Not as useful for improving your social network as for sqeezing it, but maybe there are some atmospheric/social-vibe effects to take advantage of, too. I would like to see more discussion of this.
Your Ideas:
I haven't done much research and I'm not particularly good at this social stuff, so your ideas are probably worth more than mine. What ideas or knowledge do you have for optimizing your social network and sqeezing it for all it's worth?