There's no dumb questions; I think at least part of the Council responsibilities are documented in various parts of the Maemo Wiki but might not be easily found.

Main tasks of the Council are (at least) the following;

• act as a common point of focus for community; all kinds of issues can be talked out with the Council and hopefully somethng comes out of it
• meet regularily to discuss these issues brought to council
• arrange all elections and referendums of the community
• call up and orchestrate the annual GA meeting (meeting which selects the officials of the community)
• care for the garage repository and build machine user priviliges
• update the wiki documentation
• keep the mailing list running

Other general tasks, like arranging the Coding Competition last year. (here you can insert anything else that you'd like to do/have/arrange)

Main requirements are willingness to dedicate some time to Community needs, to be able to participate in IRC meeting regularily (we have tried to keep that 1 meeting per week)
There are no strict technical abilities one needs to have, with the exception that someone in council needs to take care of the election machine which means some database skills.