Recent upgrades to room version 12 ended up with @moderator:ubuntu.com becoming the “room owner” of every upgraded room. “Room owner” is a new power level in Matrix rooms that is basically “super-admin”; it’s the same as “Admin”, but it can’t be voluntarily dropped, and a room owner can’t promote anyone else to their own power level, thus they always have full control of the room. Because the Community Council and Matrix Ops need to ensure the CoC is enforced across the entire Ubuntu Community space, the decision was made to ensure that the @moderator:ubuntu.com account was given this powerlevel, so that it’s impossible for us to end up in a state where a missing or malicious room administrator can prevent Ubuntu’s governance from managing it as needed.
This is explicitly not meant as a removal of governance power from room creators and admins. @moderator:ubuntu.com is not a human, but a Mjolnir bot controlled by the Ubuntu Matrix Ops (a team of 13 people at the moment). We’ve been using the bot only to prevent spam, administer rooms when needed, and in very rare instances to enforce the CoC. moderator having a higher power level doesn’t mean we’ll be doing anything new with the bot (beyond things we should have been able to do but weren’t previously, like removing inactive admins when active admins explicitly request us to do so), it just makes sure we can keep doing what we’ve been doing. Room admins are still in full control of their rooms as far as Ubuntu’s governance is concerned, and it would be a CoC violation for a Matrix operator to use the bot for any malicious purpose.
When the room upgrade was initially being planned, it was intended that we would notify the admins of Ubuntu’s rooms about this before the upgrade. Unfortunately, due to an oversight by the Communications Council, this did not end up happening as intended, and we apologize.
We also welcome community members to seek election to the Communication Council!
If anyone has questions about the room upgrade, please feel free to ask them here.