Curators are volunteers who decide where the @ecency vote goes. Most of that stake is delegated by supporters and every curation reward it earns goes back to them daily, so the job is reading carefully and choosing well.
Working the queue: reading new posts from every Hive front-end, voting the ones worth supporting from your own account, marking what you have handled so the next curator starts where you stopped, and flagging what does not belong.
A few hours a week is enough. There is no shift and no quota; curators pick up where the team cursor sits.
A guest seat runs for about a month. You get full desk access and the vote trail follows you from the first day, which means the @ecency stake goes where your votes go. At the end of the term the seat ends on its own and you are welcome to apply again; if the team wants to keep you, they make the seat permanent. Either way you will have seen how curation actually works here.
Read the curation guide first