This is poorly thought out and edited, because I have to run, but I thought it worth posting. I've been thinking more about libraries lately. I really think it is time to reinvigorate and expand them. Pretty sure I'm preaching to the converted here about the power of information; I think what some folks miss is just how incredibly valuable libraries are. No, they aren't a panacea, but they are a cheap source of immense social good.
A lot of people see a building full of books and wonder why it can't be replaced by a bank of terminals and Google. I won't get in to the relative merits of dead trees vs. electrons, and largely don't care about it. What that line of thought misses is two-fold: the librarians and the community space.
Decent librarians are hugely underrated resources. Great ones can be incredible. Maybe natural language systems will become good enough in my lifetime to handle some of the vague requests librarians routinely manage to match to the right book, but the leaps of association to related topics, the knowledge of the edge cases of information classification to navigate them well, and the general mass of knowledge they accumulate is massively useful to have on hand. And so few people take advantage of it.
Meeting spaces in this context (both formal, sign-up-for-your-group and informal) serve an important role as well. It seems[1] like they're becoming rarer as government buildings use security as an excuse to close to the public, and in calling around to private groups with spaces that previously did that sort of thing have been much more reluctant to do so when I've tried to organize things over the last several years.
To personalize this a bit, I grew up in a poor family. One thing that was heavily emphasized to me was the value of learning - I think it was reaction to missed opportunities. Who knows what would have happened, but I do know that my college essays (written referencing library books, building on interests fostered in the math and the American Lit sections) would have been very different without them, and I kinda doubt I would have gotten a free ride to a top-10 school if I had been only drawing on what public school offered.
I'd love to see more experiments with libraries. I know some are playing with becoming more "maker-space"-ey, which is a decent thing to explore. I think finding a way to offer peer-classes in whatever - learn Javascript, fancy knitting techniques - would be an interesting thing to try as well. But I'm bad at seeing opportunities like this. I wonder what people with that super power could come up with.
[1] Anecdata alert!