Thank you for your excellent questions, Tomslin, and apologies
for the delay in responding as I currently on the road in France.
Here are some quick initial thoughts.

> One of our biggest challenges is finding active and enthusiastic  

> volunteers willing to commit significant amounts of their time to policy
> development work from our large pool of members. In the past, as a 
> stakeholder group we've tried out a few strategies to increase our pool 
> of policy volunteers but with no significant success. I would like to 
> know what exact ideas you have on this issue.

I think the problem is twofold - attracting volunteers, and
retaining the ones we have. To attract new volunteers, I think
we need to try to reach out to like-minded organizations, but
also develop and strengthen mentoring systems to help new volunteers
get into the rather complicated ICANN world.

To retain the volunteers we have, we need to continue to speak up
about volunteer burnout, and keep hammering on the ICANN organization
and board with the message that there simply is too much workload
with too many PDPs and other important activities going on in parallel.
The current situation is of course beneficial for some of the large
commercial players and governments who can throw paid staff and
lobbyists at the problem, and actively wear out the opposition by
continuously re-litigating issues we have already reached compromises
on.

>   * Julf, in your statement, you mentioned that "you are painfully aware
>     of how the non-commercial and civil society viewpoints tend to be
>     ignored" at ICANN. And you've been around long enough to know about
>     all the efforts we as a SG have done in the past in an attempt to
>     grow our pool of active and knowledgeable policy volunteers. What do
>     you plan to do differently, which might bring us some success on
>     this issue?

I think we need to get better at prioritizing our battles, and use the
resources we have in the most productive ways possible. We can't have
volunteers slaughtered on every hill.

We also need to concentrate our forces and efforts better and try to
avoid wasting too much energy (and goodwill of volunteers) on
infighting, internal rivalries and useless conflicts and
non-constructive behavior.

	Julf