The CCC is a mature organization and culture, there would be some clear challenges to bootstraping something similar elsewhere that wouldn't be quickly infiltra

The CCC is a mature organization and culture, there would be some clear challenges to bootstraping something similar elsewhere that wouldn't be quickly infiltrated and co-opted the way that civil liberties, environmental, and other activist organizations have. CCC (and defcon) appeared to work because they operated in a similar grey-area of risk and competence as a motorcycle club. I've been pitching around the idea to use hackerone as a framework but restricted to local college and university programs to do bug finding in provincial/municipal public service delivery systems as a way to create a pipeline of competent public service talent, develop real civic engagement, and create the incentives within govt to build less appallingly shitty systems. The main challenge with that is it requires a total rethinking of what government is, which is already happening organically as dev/eng people and culture builds more generational influence in govt beyond being just "IT," but that's a longer term vision. GenX doesn't code and they're still 10-15 years from retirement, but internet generation people are slowly taking the management reins. Near term, absolutely hack your region's contact tracing apps, and if you want to really affect change, use technology and data to create and test hypothesis' to find corruption. It's going to be unpopular and even make you a target, but if you want to summarize what the cyberpunk aspect of hacker culture was, a lot of it was based on the hypothesis of there being a corrupt conspiracy running infrastructure of The System, and by learning its secrets you could become somehow more safe from it, or expose it.