> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do.<p>Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.<p>Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data.<p>If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!")<p>Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it.<p>Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard.<p>A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?"<p>Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!