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

[Jordan Mantha]

[CCing Kmos so he has a chance to respond]

On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 02:32 -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> 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.  

Thanks for bringing this up for consideration of the MOTU Council. I
think an open and honest dialog is much more useful in solving the
problem than IRC rants (even justified ones) and festering attitudes.

> 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]

These are some serious charges indeed, especially concerning continuing
incorrect behavior after being told what not to do. Marco, please do
respond to these accusations. Do you feel Hobbsee is misrepresenting
your work, or is she correct? One of the biggest issues that people are
having is that you are doing things on a mass scale before checking with
MOTUs to see if what you are doing is correct. Would you be willing to
stop doing mass changes and ask for help before making changes to bugs
for a while? 

> 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.

These seems quite odd to me but I'll take your word for it. 

> 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.

That's not good at all, we can't and shouldn't have that sort of
resource drain. What was done at the time to deal with the issue?

> 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.

How is this relevant? What are you wanting to achieve with such a
statement? I'm not being critical, just unsure.

> 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).

Reconsideration of what? The item below? Besides his LP account he
doesn't really have anything relevant but membership in ~ubuntu-bugsquad
and ~ubuntu-bugcontrol.

> 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).

I'm fairly sure this is impossible to do in Launchpad. You can't prevent
somebody with a Launchpad account from filing bugs and doing quite a bit
of the bug work Kmos has been doing. Removing his ~ubuntu-bugcontrol
membership would be the closest.

> 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.

This makes sense but I'm afraid it could be too subjective. Some people
will have a much different threshold of what's disruptive. The number of
people having to "police" in this scheme is fairly large.

Overall, I think we need to hear from Marcos. I want to know what he's
willing to do in order to cause minimal disruption. Is he willing to not
mass file bugs and ask before closing bugs? If he is then I think we can
work with that. If he is not or is not able to do that then I think we
have no alternative but to do something drastic which may take some work
from Launchpad administrators.

In all cases we need to resolve this quickly. This has been going on for
months and is doing neither Marcos nor Ubuntu any good by dragging it
around.

-Jordan