That's not necessarily the point that everyone involved should have contacts. Also contacts in the industry don't necessarily make things happen on their own.
There are two points for not doing such things alone - first one is that one person will always miss something that can be later an issue and ammunition for those who oppose the idea. Even if explanation of why something isn't considered is not going to end up in a doc, it's good to be ready to respond to something when it comes up.
Second point is that the perception of one person doing something vs a group of people doing something is different. One person is a crazy guy thinking he knows better than industry professionals, doing this as a group in a way that they are willing to spend their time on an idea means that one crazy guy has managed to convince those people already that he has something going right.
If I were to compile whole thing on my own and show it off, and even if it gets pinned like this thread - it's still that one crazy guy trying to push through and most of the people will just ignore it and don't even read the thing. Put 10 experienced people on this and write this on top of the page that this was compiled, iterated and reviewed by them and they come up with it to this state over some time, and there's completely different perception of this.
If there's no group/community effort to push it, it'll die quickly the same as the threads under editorials that I wrote on the topic.
About contacting the industry - once we have the doc/the spec for SFF standard that we want to have, and we're agreed as a group that it makes sense, we can talk to staff here to somehow organise the page in a way that when you enter the website, the standard is in-your-face visible on top of the page, it can have slightly bigger area than pinned now just for some infographic banner to be visible, or perhaps if before the main page was the news site, maybe the main page could be the standard itself if we have enough people onboard.
Once we have a place for the standard on the web, we start both getting signatures under the spec and research gathering the list of GPUs (and other components if they are part of the standard) that are within spec. Once we have reasonable amount of signatures, we go to GPU vendors and tell them "look, you've made this amount cards that are matching the standard so far, you can use the our award/standard badge on those products. We will promote those cards as part of our standard on our website as go-to cards for SFF builds"
Once the place for the standard has a list of cards that are an easy pick for SFF builds that is being kept up to date with each release and people start using it to look for their purchase, this is the moment when this can start rolling and making sense to convince the vendors to stop ignoring it.
I do have contacts in nvidia/amd/intel's GPU software divisions through colleagues that I worked with, and we as DR ZĄBER do have contacts with youtube PC hardware media through the Sentry project, but nobody will bat an eye on this if we don't have something substantial going on.
Finally, this cannot be only paper design. We need physical prototypes and proof that they exist and they make sense. With the amount of stupid stuff that people print on their 3D printers just for fun, including case designs that will be used for just one video on youtube, I would expect that bringing onboard 3D printing SFF-oriented youtubers to this is another angle to promote the idea. Also modding cards, older cards, to have the connectors where we want them, cut down the coolers and shrouds to size and so on - showing this thing is physically possible. Anything that can be a news that a group of people is doing things like this is a chance to bring a lot more people to read and sign.
