> -----Original Message-----
> Part of the problem is that over 15 years we have not managed to get more
> NFP's involved and consequently not enough hands on deck.

Addressing both Sam and Klaus: people in ICANN keep making the same mistake, again and again. The mistake is to assume that domain name policy is at the center of the universe and that if NGOs devoted to water rights, child welfare, religion, peace, housing, boat clubs, etc., etc., don't drop everything and devote most of their limited resources to ICANN then there is something wrong with the noncommercial stakeholder group within ICANN. It's an obvious fallacy to me.

The simple fact is that domain name policy is a small and specialized (yet important) area of global policy, and most people in the nonprofit world, not to mention the for-profit world, are not that interested in it, and do not know enough about it to make a participatory contribution (unless they devote a year or so to coming up to speed). And it's not cost free. For most organizations, it makes no sense for them to invest the time and money to learn about it and participate in it because it is not central to their concerns. This is just a fact everyone needs to recognize and accept.

Before you can have "hands on deck" you have to have sailors who "know the ropes" i.e. understand what the policy issues are, how they relate to ICANN's functions, what our position on those issues would be, what the consequences of various policy choices would me - not to mention how GNSO processes work. 

Indeed, it is often the case that the people who speak most loudly about adding participants rarely offer substantive contributions to actual domain name policy. I hear talk about increasing participation a lot, but not much about, say, the No-IP domain takedowns, the finer points of the EWG report, the merits or demerits of two-letter domains, the revision of the inter-registrar transfer policy, deeper thinking and creative proposals for ICANN accountability, etc. 

> been done by a few with very little, it's a miracle, but we should expect and
> put into place what my old teachers wrote beneath many of my exam
> papers: "could and should do better!". 

Always true. A truism. I suggest that "doing better" primarily means cultivating and locating expertise about DNS-related policy issues among that small segment of civil society groups who see themselves as being directly affected by those policy issues. 

MM