# A Good Excuse to Step Outside Everyday Constraints ## Hacktivism, inside and outside government Yen-Lin Huang · mashbean · Mentor Madness · Munich · 14 September 2026 Version 2 · 987 spoken words. Allow roughly 10 minutes at 105–110 words per minute, including pauses. The five sections correspond to the five slides. Headings and bracketed directions are not spoken. ### 1. Inside / outside Good morning, everyone. I'm Yen-Lin Huang, from Taiwan. You can also call me mashbean. I'm a medical doctor, and I've also been contributing to Taiwan's civic tech community, g0v. So I'm quite familiar with bureaucratic culture, as well as hacker culture. Perhaps because of this, I had the chance to work with Audrey Tang at Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. I worked on digital public infrastructure and proposed a Digital Identity Wallet project. SPRIND has been working on a European wallet, so this may sound familiar. After leaving government, I returned to civic tech and research. Honestly, I couldn't wait to hack on the open-source projects I had worked on inside government. There was still so much I wanted to try, especially around privacy and censorship resistance. Today, I'd like to share some personal observations about how cooperation between government and citizens can become more interesting. ### 2. You're being very naive When I joined, the ministry had just been established. Many civil servants applied because they wanted to change things. Outsiders like me joined with much the same idea. One day, we were discussing changes to an old system. I said, “This doesn't look that difficult. One engineer could probably fix it in a week or two.” My colleagues looked at me in horror. “Mashbean, you're being very naive. Government doesn't work like that.” [Pause.] I really didn't get it. We were changing one or two small things. Why did it need so much time and money? Eventually, of course, I understood. Government needs paperwork to establish accountability, so someone can answer when things go wrong. Procurement rules are also meant to prevent corruption and make sure suppliers can deliver. But all of this takes work. Some technical colleagues spent so much time managing contracts that they barely had time to touch the systems they were responsible for. Even making a small change themselves could be almost impossible. AI doesn't really solve that problem. The code was never the only thing they were waiting for. For someone from g0v, this was quite a culture shock. I was used to “release early” and “show me the code.” If I wanted to change my own open-source service, I could just start. We call this do-ocracy. I'm less naive now. I still want to change things, but I've become much more interested in what would make a civil servant feel able to try. ### 3. An excuse to work together I've spent roughly four years exploring digital procurement, talking to people with very different interests, including the large suppliers who dominate the market. My conclusion is that hacktivism gives people inside and outside government an excuse to step outside their usual constraints. Taiwan's Presidential Hackathon is a good example. In 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen explained that civil servants could identify a need and form a team with people outside government, instead of immediately starting with a budget and a tender. The interesting part, for me, is what happens when people who normally cannot work together finally get to do so. Take two government departments. Usually, it's easier to pass a problem to each other than to start a joint project. A hackathon gives them a reason to sit down together. Someone from outside can join that conversation without already having won a government contract. And something else matters a lot: a junior colleague can get their boss to pay attention to a problem they've been seeing on the frontline for years. The rules haven't disappeared. But suddenly, there's room to do something. ### 4. What happened afterwards? The case I'm most impressed by is “One-Stop Emergency Care,” a winner from the first hackathon in 2018. It tried to connect emergency-care information that was scattered across different organisations. As a doctor, I find that very easy to appreciate. It didn't stop at a prototype. The National Fire Agency worked with the health ministry and Taiwan's disaster research centre to continue it. Their report on 2024 records automated data transfers in twenty cities and counties, connecting ambulance care with hospital information and patient outcomes. A hackathon proposal had become part of a much larger infrastructure effort. There's also “Feng Cha,” a water-refill map by CircuPlus. If you have an empty bottle, it helps you find somewhere to fill it. I want to be clear: this was already a civic project before it won in 2020. It had around six thousand refill points. The team later reported more than fifteen thousand. The hackathon was one way to help an existing service grow through wider cooperation. LASS, an open-source environmental sensing community, is another case I like. It was already working with the Water Resources Agency before winning in 2021. Around the Touqian River, they continued sharing maps and local knowledge through regular collaboration meetings. That continued relationship is what interests me. Winning a prize is nice, but do people still work together afterwards? ### 5. Back outside These cases make it difficult to talk about government as if it were one solid block. There are people inside with a lot of experience and creativity. Quite often, they already know what needs fixing. For me, a government hackathon becomes really interesting when it makes that knowledge easier to act on. I think of this as institutionalized hacktivism. An exception can gradually become a new way of working; the institution can move from an old equilibrium to a new one. That's why I see hackathons as a possible path into innovation procurement. And it's why I still want to work on public code and digital wallets after leaving government. There is no reason the work should end when my job does. I've been following SPRIND from Taiwan for years. My own unit was called the “Section of Plurality.” I thought that was already quite an unusual name for a government office. Then I came across the “Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation.” Okay. That's even better. [Pause.] I hope you have a great day. If there's anything I can help with, please don't hesitate to find me. Thank you.