LiveJournal Advisory Board put to sleep
Here's a notification about the LJ Advisory Board not being continued after this term.
This isn't a particularly surprising development, although I find some of the wording interesting: We have outgrown the ability to rely upon a part-time board of volunteer advisors to make efficient business-critical decisions.
To my impression, it always seemed as if LJ made business-critical decisions on its own and the Advisory Board (or the parts of it we saw) was left to play catch up--you can see that in many of 's posts, he frequently was left trying to scrounge up information on occurrences.
While it's easy to suggest the Advisory Board was useless, a review of the campaign post and the acceptance post of kylecassidy suggests that he did manage to encourage the development of a few features. Some features may not have ended out as fully rounded or robust as they should have been (for instance, the site search by Yandex can't let a user search any of their friended posts, let users search their journal if they don't want indexing by Google, and frequently is behind in indexing; I think there were one or two more tools added to maintainer's toolboxes for managing posts, but not the one fanficrants needed to prevent itself from having the entire community marked adult content). Other features are yet to come--a community directory is definitely in the works, I've seen the posts about in in changelog. And maybe backups are on the way, too.
So, basically what the loss of the LJAB means is the loss of a power user's unique position to try and influence the site to add features they believed to be important.
I think there are probably ways to replicate those advantages without having an LJAB--for instance, if LJ had special occasional meetings with its dedicated volunteer Support crew about which features they think would help LiveJournal, it would probably reproduce that exact dynamic. Maybe Support people could pick out one feature between them (through popular vote, perhaps?), and LJ could dedicate a certain amount of developer time until it was done, and then the cycle could repeat. I think Support volunteers could be entrusted to follow certain requests, such as no feature that's too big or finding another one if a suggestion is infeasible, but it would probably go a long way to making progress fixing niggling details that might otherwise get overlooked.
Alternatively, it's possible that the developers don't have the time or energy to add anything to their plate, and rather than continuing a situation that could place extra demands on the system, decided to discontinue it.
This isn't a particularly surprising development, although I find some of the wording interesting: We have outgrown the ability to rely upon a part-time board of volunteer advisors to make efficient business-critical decisions.
To my impression, it always seemed as if LJ made business-critical decisions on its own and the Advisory Board (or the parts of it we saw) was left to play catch up--you can see that in many of 's posts, he frequently was left trying to scrounge up information on occurrences.
While it's easy to suggest the Advisory Board was useless, a review of the campaign post and the acceptance post of kylecassidy suggests that he did manage to encourage the development of a few features. Some features may not have ended out as fully rounded or robust as they should have been (for instance, the site search by Yandex can't let a user search any of their friended posts, let users search their journal if they don't want indexing by Google, and frequently is behind in indexing; I think there were one or two more tools added to maintainer's toolboxes for managing posts, but not the one fanficrants needed to prevent itself from having the entire community marked adult content). Other features are yet to come--a community directory is definitely in the works, I've seen the posts about in in changelog. And maybe backups are on the way, too.
So, basically what the loss of the LJAB means is the loss of a power user's unique position to try and influence the site to add features they believed to be important.
I think there are probably ways to replicate those advantages without having an LJAB--for instance, if LJ had special occasional meetings with its dedicated volunteer Support crew about which features they think would help LiveJournal, it would probably reproduce that exact dynamic. Maybe Support people could pick out one feature between them (through popular vote, perhaps?), and LJ could dedicate a certain amount of developer time until it was done, and then the cycle could repeat. I think Support volunteers could be entrusted to follow certain requests, such as no feature that's too big or finding another one if a suggestion is infeasible, but it would probably go a long way to making progress fixing niggling details that might otherwise get overlooked.
Alternatively, it's possible that the developers don't have the time or energy to add anything to their plate, and rather than continuing a situation that could place extra demands on the system, decided to discontinue it.