LiveJournal 2008: Advisory Board Elections

San Francisco: I am following the activities at LiveJournal with real interest. The company — recently purchased from Six Apart — has recently announced a great advisory board (danah boyd, Esther Dyson, Brad Fitzpatrick and Lawrence Lessig), and the hiring of Jason Shelling (formerly of Google): a lot accomplished in 100 days. I met Andrew Paulson, the CEO of SUP, the owners of LJ, and was very impressed.

As someone who serves on a lot of advisory boards, I am interested to see how a company with a very large community of users could use elected members. My work is almost exclusively with small start-ups, but the LJ experience could be transformational for the industry: imagine a similar process at work in Google, Apple, or Microsoft, for example.

[from LiveJournal 2008]

Advisory Board Elections

Now that we have invited members to be on the Advisory Board, and created a clear mandate for the work of the board, it is time to begin talking about the elections for the user representatives.

To ensure the board members reflect a representative cross section of the LiveJournal community we will hold two separate elections. There will be one user-representative for the Cyrillic language users of LiveJournal (i.e. those who use Russian as their principal language of communication) and another for the non-Cyrillic segment of LiveJournal (i.e. those who use English, German or any of the other main LiveJournal languages). Posts regarding the elections will be announced in news and ru_news. The elections will run at the same time and in the same manner.

Timeline

The nomination and election process will cover the entire month of May. For the first two weeks, we will have open nominations, and the chance for users to second the nominations. When the nominations close, there will be time for LiveJournal to certify the candidates who have been nominated and for those candidates to communicate with users regarding positions or campaigning. The elections will be open for the entire last week of May. The new LiveJournal User-Representatives on the Advisory Board will be seated on June 1, 2008.

Requirements

To be considered as a candidate for the Advisory Board elections, a user must be:

• at least 18 years old as of May 1, 2008
  
  
• nominated and elected using their primary LiveJournal username
  
  
• willing to serve under their full legal name, including having their name recorded on minutes, correspondence, opinions, or other material in relation to their service
  
  
• available to travel to the once-a-year in-person meeting in Istanbul, Turkey the week of the third Wednesday in September (September 17, 2008)
  
  
• available for quarterly conference calls, and for consultation via telephone or email correspondence should a situation arise which would need their advice
  
  
• willing to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement in relation to the work and discussion of the Advisory Board in order to keep the confidential nature of discussions which might arise

Voting

To be eligible to vote in the election, a user must have created their account before March 11, 2008. Voting will take place in the form of a poll, which will remain open during the entire last week of May. The winner will be determined via Instant Runoff Voting. This means that users will be able to select their first, second, and third choice candidate. In the event there is no clear majority, the lowest-ranked candidates will be eliminated and the users who selected those candidates as first choice will have their vote re-assigned to their second-choice candidate. That system is repeated until a clear winner is evident.