software early-adopters' "playpen" team; interested?

Here's a scenario that I think crops up in a site with a
sufficiently-large number of users...  You have a group of
users who want to run bleeding-edge versions of software
(I've seen it with GNU/etc stuff).  So, for example, if the
department's default version of Emacs is 20.7, these people
want to run the latest 22.x pre-release... You know the type
:-)

The case can be made to pander to such early adopters'
proclivities -- they build up local knowledge about
particular new versions of software, and you can tap this
knowledge when trying to make decisions about rolling
"official" versions of various tools.  If you don't pander
to them, they keep lots of junk in their home directories
:-)

One solution I've seen (more than once) is to set up a Unix
group -- `ftphax' was the first one I remember -- and give
'em a big chunk of disk (the *playpen*), and hope for the
best.  Entropy usually wins in the end :-)

It would be an ARK Not-a-Big Deal to set up a "policy" team
(as Sidai is) that would encapsulate some Rules of the Road
for a group of people to use in maintaining a software
playpen, particularly in a multi-platform context.

Matt and I have talked about this a couple of times.  We
think it would be fun and useful; however, we don't have any
compelling need for such a team.  If anyone Out There would
be keen to do something like this, we'd help...

Just a thought.

Will