You have asked "why not work within this particular structure" to accomplish what we want. You miss the point of organizing, and education and outreach are closely tied to organizing. This requires a certain social sensibility. As to past failures you have mentioned - and I wonder whether, in fact whether they were total failures or if there was value in the attempt.
Ask the people involved. I'm pretty sure they will agree they failed, and the main value was to confirm that the approach doesn't work.
Imagine an election or a referendum. An idea or candidate need not carry the day to be relevant to the process. And their absence might lend to catastrophe.
Well, you know, I don't have to imagine an election or referendum. Although it's not particularly relevant to ICANN, I'm also the mayor of my small upstate NY village, where we have real elections and referenda. With my name on the ballot, even. It's a swell way to settle arguments and move forward. Some people want to rehash them endlessly with what-ifs, which is not useful at all.
Organizing is about seeing the possibilities in certain social situations.
I hope you saw the message that Danny Younger sent out earlier this morning, in which he reports on his experience that people tend to focus on the meta-discussions of organizing and never get to the actual issues. This is the exact rathole that you are diving down. Please, accept the possibility that the experience of everyone who has done this before is relevant here, and that there are valid reasons that I and other people with ICANN experience are opposed to repeating courses of action that have only lead to failure. Like I've been saying, if you want to do stuff, do it. You don't need a RALO. In fact, given all the baggage that ICANN brings with it, if you are interested in Internet issues other than what domains go in the root, you're much better off doing your organizing without ICANN's distractions. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.