Do university departments need to be convinced with papers? It looks like the problem is that they are not aware of this program, and if they are they have no idea who to contacts or where to start. I think that personal contacts among students or teachers might make wonders. If a wikimedian knows someone in an engineering department, we could just follow up that cue. A single successful contact in one university might provide better results than a general mailing to several universities.
At FOSDEM I spoke with a couple of people from Paris and Barcelona that were looking forward to help promoting GSOC / OPW in their centers. For this round, I will simply focus on them. @Nemo_bis, @Ricordisamoa, if you can work with one university in Italy that would be great. @AKoval_WMF, if you could provide one good contact with one university, that would also help.
We can coordinate here the type of information that we provide to our contacts in universities. It looks like all of them need more or less the same pitch and the same type of approach.
