(no subject)

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1183685]

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It's not that you'd be bad at it, it's just turning into a race of egos at the moment, and it has all the prospects of being an interminable world of hurt...

[matgb]

Which is why a fair few non-egos who can critique constructively and ask decnt questions would be a Good Thing.

It's a preferential system anyway, so more candidates that are about actual substance would be good.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Ah, but can you imagine the state of your inbox when something goes wrong that you have absolutely no chance of influencing in any positive direction...

(sure the trip to Turkey would be nice, but it's really not worth it!)

[matgb]

can you imagine the state of your inbox

Yes, which is why I'm not running. But I'll support any of my friends that do and can help co-ordinate a multi candidate slate if it comes down to it.

Besides, if elected, you have to post regularly about the state of LJ, you can always turn comment notification off for those posts...

[andrewducker]

Oh absolutely. And it's that that's putting me off. I had enough experience of powerless politics at student level, and I suspect that LJ will be similar, with people running for vanity reasons and then doing fuck all about anything.

Still tempted though. I'll have a look and see who else is running in a day or two.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Ah! That's exactly what it's reminding me of - student politics at its worst.

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

To be honest, Brad was just ignored by the company, and he's one of their advisory boardmembers.

The only way to really change things is to put forth a compelling argument to everyone on the advisory board that LiveJournal is slowly dying, and that a huge part of the reason for it relates to their hamfisted, growth-killing policies and their broken promises to LJ's members.

You need more than a person to do this kind of thing right and to give the users a real voice. You need a motivated core of concerned individuals with a large crowd of supporters they can call upon to scream bloody murder, should the need arise.

Have no doubt though... people on LJ can influence policy. Nothing is more frustrating to a small company than to have a thousand irate customers screaming at you, all at once.

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

It is, and it's unfortunate. That said, it's also kinda predictable.

That's why I have intentionally *NOT* thrown my hat into this contest, so that I can ideally build up a diverse coalition of people who actually stand for something and will try to turn back the tide of LJ drama and stupidity that this race will bring forth.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Note - I voted yes because I think you'd be good for LJ. Whether LJ would be good for you is a different matter.

[sttatus-quo.livejournal.com]

ditto.
I don't think that LJ is capable of doing anything except listening to it's bottom line. They put Brad back on the board and then didn't listen to him.

If you think that you can make a difference and it won't drive you nuts.. by all means, I think you'd be a good one for the job.

[pisica.livejournal.com]

*snorts quietly [I'm in the library]*

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

I cannot in good conscience recommend that any of my friends stand for election -- it's like asking for an ulcer.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Of course I only vote that way to limit my own competition, you'd actually be rather good at it :-)(

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I want [Bad username or site: theferret' / @ livejournal.com] to run :-)

What would your campaign promises be?

[andrewducker]

Well, he has 2800 friend-ofs, so he'd likely be a lot more successful than me...

And I'd largely be aiming for freedom of speech, protection of data, openness, and understanding of the international nature of LJ.

[insomnia.livejournal.com]

I know that you probably avoid anything that even remotely smacks of politics like the plague, and would completely understand why you might send a two word reply to this comment, but I'll send it anyway.

For a long, long time now, many at LiveJournal, including people like myself who helped create it long ago, have been extremely frustrated at the management of the site, their policies, their occasional censorship, their weak response to the Russian government's prosecution of a LJer (http://www.theotherrussia.org/2008/03/13/russian-blogger-heads-to-court-after-fiery-comment/) for leaving a comment suggesting that corrupt cops should be publically burned at the stake, etc.

Well, I've created an LJ community called ljunited, where our goal is to form a large, centralized group of LJ members to fight that.

Specifically, our goal is to work towards defending and restoring the original promises made to LiveJournal's members (http://web.archive.org/web/20040401175244/http://www.livejournal.com/site/contract.bml) by LiveJournal itself.

We want to stand up for the free speech of ALL of LiveJournal's members, restore LJ's original strong support for community-based Open Source Software development, and restore community participation in the successful operations of LiveJournal... because frankly, the people managing the site are also slowly killing it (http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/48335.html) due to their poor policies.

The site is shrinking in activity about 1% a month currently, and it's within the management's power to do something about this trend, rather than contribute to it by further alienating its members.

In the past week or so, I have attracted about 150 fairly motivated people to help out. We're also working with helping candidates for the upcoming LJ advisory council elections who embrace our views.

We've endorsed rm on LiveJournal, who is a very knowledgeable, thoughtful individual (http://community.livejournal.com/ljunited/1896.html) with a lot of persuasive oomph who has been on LJ forever. A talented writer, longtime LJ member, very knowledgeable, very talented individual.

We've also attracted several LJers in the Open Source community who have their own issues relating to the open source side of LJ that need to be addressed, because LJ has turned its back on working with the open source community for its development over the years, shutting out needed improvements to the software. We want to make the case that they should reverse this policy.

Despite current crap Russian management at LJ's parent company SUP, we have some reasons for hope. Recently, they brought in someone who previously oversaw the internet development at ITV to be their general manager, so there seems to be some recognition that they need a bit of a change. Our job is to basically do a far better job in making the case for it, and to lay out where they're going wrong and what the better alternatives would be.

I'd be curious what your concerns are regarding LiveJournal and its future, because it's our goal to bring people into our group and have them positively effect our policies and ideas.

Sure, it would be a wonderful thing to have you join our community, to have your support for LJ United, its goals, and its candidate... but failing that, I invite you to find out more about us.