Glad you like the suggestions. Count me in, so long as I pass community-approved selection criteria!

While there is some urgency to get the ball rolling, taking a few weeks to iron out the fine print is worthwhile, I think, anyway.
Today is Mon 20th Feb. How about aiming for Mon 19th Mar, as a date to have the hows and wherefores complete? With a view to verifying*/selecting testing-admins' credentials by 9th April (Easter Monday) so work can start from 10th April 2012.
How does that sound?

*verifiying:
- as much as is necessary to get access, so these people can do the actual promotion.
- possibly a job for the likes of former/current members of The Council?

Matters to resolve...

• The basic remit for prospective testing-admins (TAs) and testers (e.g. activities, procedures, etc.),
• Eligibility and selection of TAs (i.e. pre-requisites and whether a vote is necessary),
• Procedures for initiation and termination (self- or forced) of TAs,
• The target number of TAs, thus how to divide up the repos between the testing teams,
• Standard testing tools (already refernced KISStester, should anything else be used instead or in addition?)
• The relationship(s) between developers and testing teams (what are members' comments on my suggestions above?)
• What happens if a TA makes an error e.g. passes a poor package, especially if it's a dependency for many other packages and ends up breaking a lot of things!?

... and many besides, I'm sure!

Promotion of tester and TA roles:
Although this thread is getting OK hits, it's quite technical/dry so probably turns off quite a few people. To get this project off the ground, we need to make a massive hullaballoo about how easy it is and how beneficial it is, as an average user, to be a tester*/TA. Otherwise if only a few people do it, we'll be in the same state in quite a short time (e.g. when devices start to give up!).
*tester - there's nothing to say that there cannot be grades of tester, based on <criteria> ranging from, say, novice to super-expert-plus-plus-plus?

Aside: Release Repository:
- Should the release repository (i.e. maemo extras) have finer sub-catgories seeing as there are likely to be a few thousand packages in extras, when things get underway?
- Can packages be cross-referrenced into two+ categories e.g. a note programme could be considered both "Office" and "Utility"; if so, how can this point-to mechanism be made to work?