Adam:
The GNSO has always been open to the possibility of new constituencies <http://www.icann.org/en/general/bylaws.htm#X-5.4> and no one bothered to try and create an individual users constituency. So what makes you think it's possible to organize such a group now?
The problem before was that the creation of a new constituency was altering the voting balance of the whole GNSO, so all existing constituencies had good reasons for blocking new entrants (except if a constituency was sure that the new one could be a sort of permanent ally, or a clone of itself). What the BGC WG tried to do, was to build a structure where this opposition was not inherent in the system. With the stakeholder groups, the only potentially opposed constituencies to a new entrant because of "power" reasons are the ones in the same stakeholder group (incidentally, that also explains why the NCUC proposal is crafted in that way, and not in a way to favour the creation of a new constituency). With the Stakeholder-Group-based structure, it is (in principle) possible to have groups that are homogeneous stakeholders, like academia and research, user protection organizations, individual (non-commercial) users, etc. It takes time and effort, but it is possible.
Is the GA basis for optimism <http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/>?
This is the latest weekly report on GA mailing activities: http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg02222.html. The message from Narten is the weekly summary, the 6 messages from Glen are the weekly ICANN announcements, you can see what else remains after these routine/admin emails. Cheers, Roberto