Comment 18 for bug 194126

I think there are other existing defect reports around this area
already, but anyhow...

a 'team' is just a collection of 'people-or-team' objects; for mailing
lists in launchpad its used to identify 'folk with subscriptions' to
mailing list - with the default subscription being 'no mail received'
- so we definitely let folk lurk at the moment. Teams are also able to
be put anywhere a role is provided for (e.g. bug assignee, project
maintainer, can-write-to-branch etc) - and teams-with-lists permit you
to couple 'being on this list is a requirement of getting this
privilege' - if you want to.

What I do in my personal projects to work around LP's UI/modelling is
in the project description include a link to the list.
https://launchpad.net/subunit is an example of this.

Grab me on IRC if you want to talk about the confusion some more, we
are totally open to fixing things, but (as you may know if you've been
following the blog) we're currently reviving our project by
identifying and zapping truely critical issues that we let build up
over time which had become ridiculously painful and a massive energy
sap.

-Rob