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LiveJournal Looks For Advisory Board Members From The Rest of Us
Blogging service LiveJournal was acquired by Russian company SUP back in December. Today they are announcing a public nomination period which will allow two LiveJournal users to become advisory board members.
There are two seats open; one for the Russian side of the site and one for the non-Russian side. The nomination period will run through May 14, voting the following week and the winners will be notified on May 30th. The selected board members term will begin on June 1, 2008 and will run for a year.
The selected users will sit in very good company. The current LiveJournal advisory board members are:
- Professor Lawrence Lessig
- Esther Dyson
- Brad Fitzpatrick
- Danah Boyd
Learn more here about how to nominate yourself (no 3rd party nominations) or to learn more about the overall process.
LiveJournal currently self reports a worldwide monthly audience of 18.7 million with 5.2 million Russian based.
The problem with having an advisory board election on LJ is that, under normal circumstances, the serious voices would be drowned out by some very non-serious candidates, viewing this thing as some sort of fashion contest.
That’s why I created LJ United, a community that’s trying to stand for serious issues like free speech, privacy, and a restoration of LJ’s previous community-driven, open source friendly business model.
Our hope is that by creating a unified, diverse group of supporters, we can see to it that the serious candidates aren’t overwhelmed by the popular yet somewhat freakish ones, so that we can actually do the job like it could mean something for the rights of LJ’s members.
Chances are good that any beauty contest winner for this position would have zero pull with the powers-that-be, specifically because they’d be incapable of influencing the rest of the advisory board and the management of LJ/SUP, but there are quite a few serious users of LJ… and we’re reaching out to them. Former LJ developers, longtime members, people who are prominent community admins on LJ, etc. (As for me, I used to oversee LJ’s business side before the site was purchased by SixApart, so we have several people who are knowledgeable and experienced.)
We recently endorsed a candidate and we’re helping her campaign, and we’re also looking to back a candidate to represent our Russian community. Hopefully we’ll build up enough support to get such people appointed.
So, yes… there will be drama on LJ as there always seems to be, but we hope to be able to accomplish something useful with an otherwise weak advisory position anyway.
I actually know a few people on the board, so I think we could make a few allies there, get them informed about the issues effecting the site they might otherwise not be aware of, and at least make a few strong arguments on behalf of the members of LiveJournal, because frankly, there are certainly quite a few problems that the site is facing, and most of those are related to longterm management failings in respectfully addressing the longstanding culture of the site.