Darren,
No, there are currently no long-form playthroughs of Aurora by the blind. LordLondon and myself were thinking of doing one, possibly sharing the database back and forth over a few years to demonstrate how things work. That's still in the future, however.
A good set of first steps for the game is something like this...
1. Open the Officer’s window, by tabbing to "Commanders," and pressing enter. Despite the name it is used to deal with all sorts of officers, including civilian administrators/governors.
2. Check the "Automated assignments," checkbox, to let the game handle the problem of assigning ship commanders and such without you having to worry about it.
3. Tab through to find the tree view with a list of officer categories. Expand "Administrators," at the bottom, and find a governor who is at least admin rating 3, or whatever rating is required for Earth, from the population screen. Tab through the rest of the fields and find their list of bonuses, read them. It's the first list.
4. Repeat until you find a person you like, and finally tab to the third list, which is the list of potential assignments. Select "A3, Earth," or whatever world name you chose, and go back and hit "assign."
5. You'll find the second list now shows they were assigned as governor for Earth. If you open up Earth's colony summary and explore the screen a bit with screen review, you'll see their info listed.
This is a step-by-step process which will work the same no matter how many colonies you have.
Research, which is also important, works similarly. You have several lists of current projects, research fields, and scientists. You select a field you want, a project within that field, and a scientist, and the game defaults to assigning them the maximum number of research labs they can handle, or the max you have available, whichever is lower. You then hit "create," and suddenly you have a new project in your list.
Research of some kind and assigning a governor are both things that will need to be done at the beginning of every game, and will be easier once version 1.10 comes out with more support for keyboard shortcuts.