Taiwan's Mask Map — Open-API Civic Collaboration During the 2020 Mask Shortage

When COVID-19 triggered nationwide mask shortages, Taiwan's government introduced a real-name rationing system on 6 February 2020 limiting purchases to two masks per person every seven days at 5,869 contracted pharmacies and health centres, each restocked with roughly 400 adult and 200 child masks per day.

Rather than build a single official app, the government (under Minister without Portfolio Audrey Tang, authorised by the Executive Yuan to run a cross-departmental data-opening effort) published an open API updating pharmacy mask inventories every three minutes. The civic-tech community g0v, working with individual developers such as Howard Wu, had already produced an early crowdsourced mask-availability map in January; once the official API went live, it fed a wave of independently built tools.

A peer-reviewed survey identified 134 mask-finder applications by 15 March 2020, of which 110 were valid for analysis: 63.6% built by individual developers, 33.6% by companies, and the rest by government agencies and NGOs. Most were websites (60.9%) or LINE/Facebook bots (19.1%), with 60% offering a map view. The approach let the state hold a single rationing policy while a competitive ecosystem of citizen-built interfaces delivered it in whatever form suited different users, reducing queuing and panic-buying at pharmacies.

The scheme was pandemic-specific and wound down as mask demand eased later in 2020, so it is best read as a proof of concept for open-API/civic-collaboration crisis response rather than a permanent institution.

Read the full analysis: https://infodemic.doublethinklab.org/transcript4.html