Keeping up with and creating communities for platform users

In addition to whatever student advisory board we have, we should
maybe ask students (and faculty) to sign up and identify themselves as
primarily Mac or Windows or Linux users. Then, we have an audience
we can periodically (like once a year) ask about trends/preferences,
etc, rather than a) guessing, or b) playing catch-up. We could offer
prizes (techcash, tosci's cards) for participating in the survey.

I think this might be a slightly better way to engage the community,
rather than the periodic surveys we send out to a small subset of
mailing lists. The hard part would still be encouraging people to
sign up. But maybe we could do something clever like offer an opt-in
checkbox when users automatically download Windows, or OS X, or
Debathena. Or possibly even major pieces of software, like Kerberos
or SecureCRT. If we phrase it as something like "Click here to opt-in
to receive an annual survey on

at MIT and how we
can improve our offerings to you", it might get a better response. Or
it might turn out to be useless...

But I think something like this would be better than relying on User-
Agent and similar data to determine what people are using.

-Jon