This is not about a flight crew placard. Like you said, everyone does flight crew placarding. Before, when we would flight crew placard, we would leave with an "open write up" that would be signed off or "balanced" by maintenance when we arrived in a maintenance base. That is no longer the case. This is about the pilots doing the corrective action part of the log book or "balancing" it as Mason said and maintenance not even looking at the MELed equipment for the length the MEL is good for.

This is a step that maintenance would usually take 30 minutes to an hour to complete . In order to reduce delays, management thought it would be a good idea to put that responsibility on the pilots.