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

[Daniel Holbach]

On Di, 2007-12-11 at 21:23 +0900, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> * Lack of a known means to stop activities other than through
> voluntary compliance
> 
>     Regardless of the sequence of actions taken to resolve the issue
> at this time, the lack of a publically known method of blocking
> activity other than repeatedly talking to someone means that we only
> have means to control those who respect the community, and voluntarily
> abide by decisions taken.

In case where this fails a governance body should be asked to help
solving the problem.


> * Lack of an abilty to effectively track community members activities
> 
>     Currently, there is no easy means by which to track any
> individuals activities (I know I'd have liked to be able to track my
> own on several occasions).  This makes it equally hard to determine
> someone's total activities when they are doing good work as when
> providing oversight.  For mailing lists and IRC, there are generally
> public logs, which help, but having a page on launchpad showing every
> bug touched (commented, status adjusted, etc.) would be a great help
> when reviewing someones activities (and would help protect against a
> partial presentation of evidence that was good, or was bad).

I feel that it got easier since Launchpad (in addition to the
person-related bugs pages) got the +packages overview.


> * Lack of MC stepping forward to make a statement.
> 
>     This is actually represented in two ways.  Firstly by the
> disruptive activities of the individual discussed for several months
> with multiple public complaints (albeit no escalaction to MC), and
> secondly by the statements of two MC members specifically indicating
> they are not speaking on behalf of MC.

I agree, this should have been escalated to the MC much earlier. This is
part of the MCs agenda but was never made use of. The process is fairly
new to all of us, but sorting this out will get something good out of it
for us.

Regarding the "not speaking on behalf of the MC" notes: I maybe could
have made it clearer in my mail, but what I tried to say is: "This is my
proposal, with my MC hat on, it's just no official decision yet."


> * Lack of an efficient communication channel to discuss the positive
> and negative contributions of community members.
> 
>     Currently, there is no real means beyond complaining about someone
> (which isn't always fair or nice) to indicate to others that that
> person's contributions may be unsuitable, or need extra attention.
> Further, there's no good way to encorage people who demonstrate
> excellence.  As a result, we all operate blindly, and none of us have
> a coherent picture of the contributions of any community member
> (whether casual user, Contributor, MOTU, or core-dev, and even less so
> for those outside the developer community)

My proposal could help with that. In case we're extremely unhappy about
the quality of contributions of somebody (which really doesn't happen
often) this concern should be raised and be checked.

If people demonstrate excellence, you should encourage them. If you feel
they are ready, ask them about their plans for applying for MOTU.


>     Completely separately from the above, and in this specific case,
> I'd like to state that I find that ~ 70% of the issues Marco raises
> are valid, although there are often small mistakes that require
> investigation prior to application, and in many cases I find it takes
> more time to investigate than it would to treat the consideration as a
> unfinished bug report and perform the activities myself (which is not
> my typical experience with submissions). 

Thank you for sharing this information. I also shared my view on this
already, but do you feel the amount of work you put into fixing or
explaining is much higher than that of other contributors in the
sponsoring queue?


>  Further, I'd like to note
> that Marco's activities early in the gutsy cycle tended to be of
> higher quality, and prepared with more care: to me it seems that as
> time passed, the effort taken to ensure that not only was there a
> solution, but that it was the right solution, that it was implemented
> correctly, and that it was documented correctly decreased.  In many
> cases, Marco can be helpful, but the sum total of activities with the
> recent attention to detail does not provide a net benefit.  I would
> welcome a return to the quality of contributions seen ~ 6 months past,
> which genuinely assisted in the completion of gutsy as it was
> released, and hope that the final solution determined by MC will lead
> to a net positive gain for Ubuntu.

Noted.

Have a nice day,
 Daniel