all good, sensible points. I'll add to the mix: several At Large members are business owners in the IT space, offering consulting services. Yet none has come out with an offer of manpower to do the job of analyzing requirements and platforms for the successor of Skype. I find this appalling (but not surprising, sadly.)
Not only have I offered my services, I have actually spent time assisting an evaluation by creating an At-Large Discord server which a number of people here have visited. In the absence of action from the Technology Taskforce, I believe that some of my posts on the issue have offered reasonable and unbiased attempts at comparative evaluation (given that I regularly use almost all of the options myself).
I consider Karl's proposal well-intentioned and well-reasoned but futile. Inertia is mighty here; current and potential participants are loath to risk reductions in ICANN's funding should they seek independent sources. I would suggest that the freedom to choose their own spending priorities without ICANN guardrails -- along with the attached responsibilities and duties of care -- is a frightening prospect to many here. And given that I already believe that ALAC spends way too much human capital on process compared to policy, I further suggest that adding the extra bureaucracy needed to pursue and manage independent funding offers yet more opportunity for distraction from the core bylaw mandate.
More likely to succeed, but not by much, would be for ALAC to advocate for more control over the ICANN budget allocated to it. Give it targets and standards, and let it determine itself how much to spend on support staff or projects. This could be a significant improvement over the status quo without requiring creation of an external body, yet I suspect that even this entails an unacceptable risk to those too comfortable with the current living arrangements.
More than once during my own time in ALAC leadership I toyed with the notion that we could supplement project funding -- from foundations and philanthropists and crowdfunding and maybe even registries, but never memberships. That notion never became strong enough to voice, for the reasons above.