I tentatively plan on opening the first beta world on Feb 12th. I say tentatively because I have a beta world running in test and want to make sure everything is running fine with it, plus I will be out of the office most of next week, so if I do find anything wrong with the test beta world between now and then, I might have to adjust the schedule. There's also the possibility that we run into technical issues when creating the beta site on production which could delay the launch.
In either case, whenever we are ready to allow users to sign up for beta, I will post it in the forums and in the GD admin message, as well as hopefully getting an email blast out to the users that GD beta is open. So you will know when it is ready, but I wanted to give a little warning ahead of time. If it looks like we are good later next week, I'll post the date ahead of time in more obvious locations to make sure all people that want to participate know it is going on.
So it looks like whoever chided me about the Valentine's Day Beta Launch is going to be correct.