Day 3: Wednesday 3/26

After spending Tuesday night in the fabulous Hotel Tomo, located in Japantown in San Francisco (Thanks Sean!), we headed off to visit 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing workshop and tutoring organization started by Dave Eggers (also founder of McSweeney’s, which incidentally is housed in the same building as 826). Eggers gave a fabulous presentation at TED this year that explains the philosophy behind 826 and the work that it is does, which you can check out below:



After lunch at the Berkley Bowl, we headed out to see the operations at MapLight, a nonprofit organization working on trying to improve government transparency. MapLight's use of technology to drive social change was particularly interesting - our discussion afterwards centered on the notion that the use of technology to drive social change still seems to be underexploited. (Random aside: Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig recently joined the board of directors of MapLight.) Afterwards we visited Taoit, a new startup out of Berkeley that looks like it’ll be doing some really cool things. They’ve asked us not to blog about their service, so you’ll have to wait until the public release – but stay tuned.



Our day ended with a terrific visit with Brij Kothari, founder of PlanetRead and an Ashoka fellow. PlanetRead works on creating same language subtitling (SLS) for movies and music videos to help improve literacy in India. After dinner we all crammed into a tiny apartment in Berkeley, which was generously provided to us by Sophia's sister (thanks!)