We have an unknown number of existing packager's at present.
We also do not know who is working on what and who has worked on what and who is currently on vacation/busy/left the distro.
We have some dedicated packagers who do a lot of heavy lifting and we have some packagers who package whenever time permits.
I am very apprehensive about stepping on the toes of existing packagers by becoming overzealous and doing something that they are already doing. It will also be a waste of man hours doing the same thing over and over.
Things like KDE / VLC / Firefox etc are probably well known and our pillars of packaging must be working on them. And they will know if someone who regularly does that has stopped or not.
However things become murky about the fringe packages.
Eg. rekonq. I have seen the package request for 2.0 release sitting for sometime unattended. I have done a job on it (hopefully good). But was it sitting because the packager who routinely does it was busy or because no one was doing it?
How about a wiki page listing packages, version, last updated by, date of last packaging, next version available, scheduled to be packaged by
dukto R5 sling-shot 22-12-2012 not-released not-scheduled
Also will there be a time period after which the package can be deemed to be allowed to be touched by another free packager?