[1][2] His personal interest in democratic activism began when with the 500,000-strong demonstration against the National Security Bill 2003, in which he participated as a secondary school student.
[5] He relocated back to Hong Kong around the time of the Umbrella Movement protests and began taking part internet freedom advocacy alongside his data scientist career.
[4] He led the creation of a g0vhk open political data platform collating attendance, speech, and voting records of incumbent Hong Kong legislative councillors, and information about candidates in the 2016 general election.
He criticized the complacency of civil servants who think they have complied with open data regulations but only post scan images of documents.
[11][12] Ahead of the 2019 Hong Kong local elections, Wong led the g0vhk project Vote4.hk, which collated public data about candidates and compiled voter guides.
The dashboard attracted 400,000 page views per day during the peak of the pandemic and was maintained by a team of some 20 volunteers assisted by automatic web crawlers.
[15] Wong Ho Wa said that the hardest part of maintaining the dashboard was finding committed volunteers to fact-check reports of unscrupulous mask merchants.
[17] Nevertheless, Wong commended the CHP for providing an API for its coronavirus case data and that the Hong Kong government's open data practices had improved significantly in the late 2010s, even though Hong Kong still fell short of the Open Knowledge Foundation's standards, lagging behind nearby regions like Shanghai and Taiwan.
[18][19] In July 2020, Charles Mok, the incumbent Information Technology functional constituency representative in Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo), announced that he would not seek re-election.