Michael Lee's Train of Thought

One of the more interesting questions came up as part of last weekend's CONvergence committee meeting. As I mentioned as I started to look at building a SF Convention IT Infrastructure, one of the biggest challenges in working with a non-profit volunteer organization like a science fiction convention is that you have a variety of different operating systems amongst the people working on it, and unlike a business environment, there's very little centralized control over what sorts of systems that people have.

I was interested in seeing that about 25 percent of the people attending the committee meeting were Macintosh users, with the rest being Windows users. I was surprised that there were only 1 or 2 people that were primarily Linux users; I would have expected to see that higher than average.

My biggest take away is how much you'd like to build systems that can handle multiple OSes -- a department like programming should ideally work where the heads don't need to be running a particular operating system in order to handle the data needs of their department.

I'm curious how our percentages compare to other convention committees, both locally and around the country -- that's a higher percentage of Mac users than generally reported on in the general population, but that is really difficult to be sure about.

Labels: convergence, fandom, it