Our Inspirations

In 2012, civic hackers in Taiwan started g0v by taking government websites and building better ones — the same data at the same address with one letter changed, and actually usable. Audrey Tang was one of them. In 2014, when the Sunflower Movement occupied the legislature, Tang helped keep the occupation's communications running.

Two years later, Taiwan made Tang its first digital minister. A protester became an institution builder, and the qualification was, in the end, having made a better website. When COVID arrived in 2020, the answer was not an app the public was asked to trust. The government put its numbers and its supply data on the web in the open, and civic hackers had the trackers people actually used running within days.

That is what we aspire to: government applying what consumer technology learned about speed, transparency and trusting the user, for public good — and the door into the institution opening because the work was good.

18F was a team inside the US General Services Administration that, from 2014, sat down with federal agencies and did the unglamorous work: user research, plain language, a shared design system, open source by default. Agencies got more usable not through a grand modernization but because someone with a design perspective was in the room when the decisions got made.

On March 1, 2025, it was shut down overnight. The staff were locked out of their computers at midnight.

Almost none of what made 18F work went with them. The methods were published. The design system is open source. The guides are on the web. The team was shut down; the work did not have to stop — it needed people willing to keep doing it, at whatever scale they could.

Take what consumer software has learned about clarity, speed and respect for the person on the other side of the screen, and spend it on the systems people cannot opt out of: registering to vote, showing up for a shift, finding out what the rules are.

Taiwan's trackers were built by a handful of people in a few days. 18F's best work was usually one designer in one meeting. Scale was never the point. Being in the room was.