 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to SoCAP Day 3. Welcome to SoCAP Day 3. Thanks. Well, we've got some fantastic stuff lined up for you today. My name is John Axel, and I have been to seven SoCAPs. I'm the associate producer here at SoCAP in the Hub Bay Area, and it's been great to watch this movement grow. What's been even more enjoyable has been watching ideas and models at SoCAP applied in community. The theme of this morning's main stage is making meaning matter through changing the rules. And this really relates to how some of us who work at the Hub here in San Francisco have been thinking about how to change the rules in our own community. You may or may not know this, but the Hub in San Francisco sits one block from a district called Midmarket or the Tenderloin. It's a neighborhood that faces complex issues of social justice and homelessness. It's a neighborhood where empty buildings sit idle as people walk by searching for work. Or where you have to walk blocks just to find a place to wash your hands. People wait in line six hours to find a place to sleep or eat. Here in San Francisco, as many of us know, extreme need and extreme excess are next door neighbors. This situation may remind you of the neighborhood around the block from where you work or live. I'm going to play a short video that kicked off an effort to examine these challenges in a partnership that we formed with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, American Express and the City of San Francisco. And I'll talk about how this theme relates to what's going to be happening here on stage today. Go ahead and cue the video. This neighborhood is so complex with so many different layers. Most people, because it might be uncomfortable to them or because homelessness is something they don't understand, or maybe they're scared about themselves and seeing themselves in homelessness. I mean, there's so many reasons why people have a knee-jerk reaction to look away. And I think that the current system is not working. Even if you work full-time, you cannot afford an apartment in the city. You can't afford adequate housing. Poverty is more than just an economic indicator. Everyone does want to be connected to jobs, to be connected to employment. Money raises every other problem in a person's life. I think all of these tools, crowdfunding, sharing, creative and local currencies, are really rising because there's a need within community and society to have people be empowered. We all know that the gap between people who have way too much and people who have not nearly enough is getting wider and wider. And the use of technology is an important part of it. There's no reason why technology can't change the lives of every individual that we serve when done in a way where we continue to hold that person as an individual and do it in a way where it's compassionate and it's supportive. So Hackathon is basically an event where people come together from different backgrounds using technology and try to take an idea as far as they can in 48 hours. Obviously in the mid-market there's less exposure to technology than you see in other communities, but that just means that the solutions you develop have to be particularly driven by what's already there. People in our community have ideas and people in our community are gifted and talented and have skills and have something to offer. If those ideas are generated by the people who live here and work here, those are going to be the most viable ideas. If we bring all of these platforms and tools together and use them to work with community members to create their own solutions, I think we have the formula for a really powerful change agent and catalyst for a movement. So after the time this video was made, we spent six months working with members of the hub, local technologists, community leaders, creatives, makers, people who wanted to do something to learn and contribute to this experiment. We wanted to see if the ideas, models, technologies that we knew so well could be applied in our own community. Sometimes they could, sometimes they couldn't. But what we realized was that changing rules isn't easy. Teams listened a lot and they came up with really good ideas. The reality was that the teams worked so hard to overcome political, historical, and social barriers that were very complex. That's what brings me to the point that I want to make today as we dive into the great schedule that we have. Socap Community, I admire the persistence, intelligence, and inspiration in this room. We've heard this week how hard this work is. But isn't it worth it? What we do here is produce action in the context of information and relationships. After four years, I'm amazed at the action we've produced. I'm even more amazed by the authenticity of relationships in this community and the way that we're pushing the world forward.