Request for MOTU Council to consider Marco Rodrigues (Kmos) not potentially suitable for MOTU

[Scott Kitterman]

This has been a difficult mail to try and write.  I've struggled with it for a 
long time and not come up with a completely satisfactory way to deal with 
this issue.  

I've decided to just go ahead and send this as good as I can make it right now 
because we are getting close to Debian Import Freeze and the potential for 
him to be disruptive to the MOTU work flow is about to go up again.  

This is an excerpt from a discussion explaining what is the trouble that 
happened recently on #ubuntu-motu.  Link to the full log is below.

<Hobbsee>  Kmos is probably the most disruptive motu-hopeful we've ever had.
<Hobbsee>  he's gone from closing bugs at random, to mass filing sync 
requests, to mass filing removal requests, to then making promises that he 
has no right to make.
<Hobbsee>  each time, he says he wont do it again, and then finds something 
more disruptive to do
<Hobbsee>  he manages to remember information for short periods of time.  i've 
had him forget (willfully, or otherwise) information in just under an hour.  
He then claims that he was never told the information.
<Hobbsee>  he's also one of the few to have been thrown out of debian-games 
too, and attempted to be thrown out of ubuntu.
<Hobbsee>  each time, he appears to have little-to-no consideration of others, 
and also likes randomly pinging people so they can action whatever he wants 
done - even though it's far from urgent.
<Hobbsee>  yes, he's still around somewhat, but much quieter.
<Hobbsee>  and various people have stepped down from the sponsorship queue due 
to him.

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2007/11/28/%23ubuntu-motu.txt starting at [10:51]

Additionally, I think that frustration with him and the lack of anyone doing 
anything about it is the major source of the declining friendliness of 
#ubuntu-motu and the MOTU ML in recent months.

I started going through all the IRC logs and bug filings on Launchpad to 
present a detailed accounting of the scale of the negativity caused by Marco, 
but it was to depressing.  I'd invite you who are unfamiliar with his work to 
grep the online IRC logs and look at his track record on bugs.  At one point 
in the Gutsy development cycle it was taking 3 or 4 MOTUs to keep up with 
undoing the damage this one person was doing.

It appears to me that nothing of any significance has changed about the work 
that he is doing.  It is overall of negative value and disruptive to Ubuntu 
development.  The only change is that he's been less active lately.  When 
he's active, things appear to me to be of the same low quality that we've 
been seeing for months.  

This is an unprecendented request, but this is an unprecendently 
distruptive 'contributor'.  Before making this request, I consulted with Jono 
as the Ubuntu community leader to determine the appropriate forum to resolve 
our concerns.  He told me that MOTU Council should evaluate this for Ubuntu 
(I had thought it would be the Community Council, but he said MOTU Council 
had the authority to decide this).

This is what I believe is necessary to resolve my concerns:

1.  That the MOTU Council make a statement that it does not believe that in 
the near term he has the potential to be a MOTU.

2.  That the MOTU Council make a provision for reconsideration at a later date 
so that this is not a permanent decision (my though is if he can privately 
convince two MC members he's deserving of another chance then they can bring 
it to the community and we can decide).

3.  That the MC ask for all of his Ubuntu related Launchpad priviledges be 
revoked (he is involved in at least one other project that uses LP, so it's 
more complicated than just suspending his accoung).

4.  That the MC tell him he is invited to read the MOTU mailing list and the 
IRC channel so that he can continue to attempt to learn, but that he is not 
to give advice/answers or disrupt the activities of developers (asking the 
channel generically for an answer wouldn't count, but bothering specific 
developers would).  That the MC authorize IRC operators and mailing list 
admins to enforce this if he does not restrain himself.

Scott K
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