LJ Advisory Board Ends

[charmian]

Someone sent me a message about how the LJ has decided to discontinue the LJ Advisory Board.

More info can be found here: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_advisory/1840.html

According to the post, they "have outgrown the ability to rely upon a part-time board of volunteer advisors to make efficient business-critical decisions." (Eh? Has there been that much growth?)

It always seemed to me that it was pretty much a waste of time and effort: the elections were circuses, the board didn't seem to meet that often, and LJ users really cannot be accused of failing to provide detailed feedback on a variety of issues, so I never really understood the need for a board.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

I never got the impression that they relied on the board to make efficient business critical decisions, although it is possible that the features the Advisory Board was recommending versus the features LJ Headquarters was hankering for was enough to make the developers cry Uncle! and one had to go.

[charmian]

Huh, but would the Board even directly talk to the developers? I'm not even sure if they were tasked with recommending features etc. It could also be that it just simply got to be too much trouble to deal with the elections, organizing the meetings, etc, so it went. I find the way they were all like 'our growth means the board isn't useful anymore' weird, though.

[foxfirefey]

The board wouldn't have to talk directly to developers to affect them; it could be things that get added to their queue of things to do. I'm cobbling that together based on kylecassidy's feature goals and things that happened.

I think you're right about organizing the meetings--they'd be a lot easier to organize if it was just the two elected representatives, as opposed to all of the advisory board (which included some very, very busy people in the industry).

Or maybe the LJAB was too much of a negative nelly (Takeover with automatic audio, whine whine whine!), causing LJ to go WTF why do we keep on having to soothe these people while trying to make money geez, we have better uses of our time.

[charmian]

Hard to say, though. In the end, there has to be a 'decider' who decides what gets put into action and not, and I would expect that this person also talks to the developers as to what is feasible and what works well together, as well as what can be realistically done given the time/money/resources. If the Advisory Board's preferred features were too much, I would expect that the people in charge would simply not order the developers to work on them.

I don't know if that really proves anything, re: the impact of the user representative. On Cyrillic LJ, for a long time there was a Yandex feature on the navbar, and on the LJ.ru page. This just seems to be an extension of that. Also, LJ.ru for a long time had a community catalogue, so these were not new features to LJ, and they might have had plans for them all along.

It could be that... Also, maybe the board was too balanced to the US side of the equation, and if they're focusing more on the RU side of things, US-based input is not as relevant?