Plenty of people are already working on solutions to our various social problems, but lack resources. Some are capable of living off very little, but there's one recurring cost you can't escape... food.
There are several hackers focus on automated agriculture[1][2], but mostly as a business. Then there's Soylent.
If hackers could form a guild, and harvest crops or refine Soylent ingredients[3] collaboratively, to save on food costs and time spent on meal preparation, might we stand a better chance of getting important projects like gnunet and garage microchip printing[4] to a user friendly state?
In Vancouver BC, other community projects have had a lot of success:
http://freegeekvancouver.org
http://vancouver.hackspace.ca/wp
http://vancouvertoollibrary.com
http://vancommunitylab.com
The issue of "You need to eat" seems to me the biggest barrier in conquering the social problems of net neutrality, DRM, and independent microchip/circuit fabrication (as a hedge against backdoors). Tackle that problem, and every other difficulty becomes much more manageable. Within a century, this will probably become a municipal service like public libraries, given trends in automation eventually making it a predictable, low-risk technology.
[1] http://wiki.farmbot.it
[2] http://hortodomi.com
[3] http://blog.soylent.me/post/51243920779/whats-in-soylent
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM
[5] For bonus points, check out http://opensourceecology.org
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7755616 <- See this discussion for more reasons why local food supply (with user agency), automated production to reduce labour waste, and charity need to be solved together.
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