I'll be adding my view on those points as well. Although they don't contradict Phantom's views it may provide a little different point of view 
Will these project teams be open to staff only or to everyone? (Ie. a group a players are thinking of making a promotional video for CG, would they all have to apply as a staff member to be able to get some form of support from the rest of the staff?)
Staff teams themselves are Staff-only. That mean, you apply for staff, and state what areas you would like to help in. If hired, you are then assigned to one or more teams, of course based on what you want to eb doing. That "assignment" can change at any time, as needed and requested.
Obviously, staff teams can work together with players to get things done. That doesn't make the players staff, or an official part of the team, but I think that's a non-issue to be honest. In your example, if a group of players wants to make some promotional videos, I would be fine with setting them up with an account with just a few basic commands that can help while recording videos, nothing else. Of course they'd have to be accompanied by a member of Staff to prevent those limited commands from being abused. But in the end I think activities like this should be encouraged.
How will rights be managed? (Who determines what rights are assigned to team members? And more importantly, who checks up on those rights?)
That depends on the team really. As you can probably imagine, staff members dealing with in-game support and in-game events have more permissions than forums/irc mods. On the other hand, forum and irc mods would have more powers on the forums.
Although we haven't really discussed this within Staff yet, I intend to have one thread per Staff member in the Team Leader section. That thread will, among plenty of other things, contain details like which access they have in what area.
Reflecting back on the previous example, if a group of players would like to make a promotional video and they'd like the ability to fly around for better camera work, how'd you handle that scenario?
Pretty much answered above. I'd think this would be a rather uncommon practice, so I don't think it warrants putting a whole system in place. As long as we make sure they can only access the "enhanced" account while someone to supervise is around, I don't see an issue.
When a team is ready to be started up, who'll actually do that? Is that also a team that'll have access to making teams? And again how does this relate to rights, and how do you prevent them from right escalation?
As said, different teams (and team leads) have different levels of access. For practical reasons I and Hash pretty much have access to everything at the moment, we might change that if needed. Other team leads get access as needed. The moderation lead will have the needed forum access to set things up here, the development team lead (also in charge of server administration), will handle things server side when nescessary. An in-game support or event team lead would be able to set up in-game accounts. Etcetera...
Honestly, this has not (yet) been discussed in such a detailed manner, and I doubt it's even really needed. As long as we make sure people have the access they need to get things done without opening things up too much, that seems more practical to me than detailing it all beforehand.
As for deciding to add a team, that would ultimately be up to current team leads. However, requests from the Staff and the community in this regard should be taken very seriously. If there is a good base for a (temporary) team, there's usually no harm in trying it out. If it doesn't work out, a team is just as easily removed.
Who'll be in charge of monitoring in-game activity? Team leads? If yes, then the team leads actually need to be more capable than just the purpose of the team, they may not be up to the task and will actually require monitoring if they're doing it well. If no, will there be a dedicated team, or will this be one of the tasks of the team managing team, if such team were to be there (like asked in last question).
The team leads dealing with in-game stuff (events and in-game support for now) would be in charge of monitoring activity and logs. In general, a team lead is responsible for monitoring those in his/her team, as necessary. It does not need to be a big brother scenario, but of course integrity will always have to be monitored.
As for monitoring team leads, we need a certain base of trust. Sure team leads should check up on each other and stay up-to-date on what is happening, but we're not going to set up a system where team leads have to check each others' work and activities all the time. It has to end somewhere.
How will teams communicate within them, with the community and with the rest of the staff? This one is especially important, because although it's easy to blame concrete subjects, such as inactivity and power abuse as the cause why the old CG staff failed, communication is likely a one of the core problems behind all of them.
- Changes in staff structure.
- Changes to teams and their personnel.
- Bug fixes.
- Decisions related to support (we will/won't solve bugged quests, we will help with a bugged wall in ICC until it's fixed, etc.)
- New events/plans for new events.
- Discussions about changes (viewing them, in most cases contributing to them would just cause a massive mess).
Teams will communicate mainly on IRC and the forums. As will the Staff as a whole. As will the team leads among each other. As will the Staff to the community. Any other platforms (teamspeak, facebook, telegram/whatsapp, in-game, e-mail, etc), are not primary tools for relaying or discussing important info, with the exception of Staff or team meetings which you'd want to do on teamspeak. In general anything important to a team, the staff or the community should always be announced or posted on these forums.
I think going into who exactly covers which area is way beyond the scope of this post. Teams are only just being set up, and we will simply have to see how it evolves. In general a team lead will be in charge for communicating about his team. If needed, we might put a few people dedicated to communication, but with such a simple structure I honestly think we can manage without. We'll see how it goes. Nothing is set in stone.
Who'll be in charge of fixing 'screwups'. Mistakes happen, intentional (power abuse) or not (accidents), somebody will have to clean up after them.
Primarily the team leader covering the area that the screw-up happened in.
Also to prevent abuse from being carried out in the first place: especially in-game Staff will get those commands they need, not too much more. Commands like adding items or gold, among others, are to be avoided in my opinion. Although it's probably an illusion to think they will never be needed, it would be good if we could make those very rare situation, so that it can simply be assigned to a team lead if needed.
How'll you take care of recruiting, applying and tutoring? Is this a task left over to each team on their own? Is there a global overlapping process for just joining 'general staff' before joining specific teams. On the old CG staff, without pointing fingers, there were a lot of GMs who weren't capable of doing what they should've been able to do. This is not the fault of the person in question, not all of us are technicians and engineers. (For those who actually read through this wall of text, and don't know it yet, being a GM actually requires you to know a whole bunch of technical stuff to do seemingly simple tasks.) However, those GMs could've been a lot better if they'd have actually received proper instructions, better tools and initial guidance. Will there be a specific team tasked with educating new GMs and updating the current ones, possibly in coordination with the dev team?
I have a simple single-application system in mind where people just apply for Staff in general, and indicate in their application what they would like to do. The team leads covering those areas will then discuss among each other and set up an interview if they think it's a good candidate.
I have not yet brought this up in the Staff though, we're not ready to open applications at this time, so we'll see about that when it's time to do so.
In general, I think you're focusing too much on the details 
Yes, we're thinking about the little things as well, but one of the reasons for going for a relatively simple and flexible structure is not to set everything in stone and be stuck with it. We'd rather use common sense and see how it goes. Thus, we're not going to put every possible scenario in some kind of procedure. We'll see how things flow and change where necessary.
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. Also, you can have repeat staff members on a certain project as well. Just color code the staff or place names over the bubbles. Anything really, just be creative.
