The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, launched a new initiative to use open source technologies to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat COVID-19 and future epidemics. The new Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) initiative is launching with seven Premier members – Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent, and VMware – and two hosted exposure notifications projects, COVID ShieldTM and COVID GreenTM, which are currently being deployed in Canada, Ireland, and several U.S. states.
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LFPH will initially focus on exposure notification applications that use the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) system and will be expanding to support all aspects of PHA’s testing, tracing, and isolation activities.
“To catalyze this open source development, Linux Foundation Public Health is building a global community of leading technology and consulting companies, public health authorities, epidemiologists and other public health specialists, privacy and security experts, and individual developers,” said Dan Kohn, LFPH general manager. “While we’re excited to launch with two very important open source projects, we think our convening function to enable collaboration to battle this pandemic may be our biggest impact.”
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COVID Shield was developed by a volunteer team at Shopify and is in the process of being deployed in Canada. COVID Green was developed by a team at NearForm as part of the Irish Government’s response to the pandemic. Since being deployed by Ireland’s Health Services Executive two weeks ago, it has achieved extraordinarily high adoption of over 1/3rd of the country’s adults. Both apps are available for other PHAs and their IT partners to use and customize and will soon be joined by other open source projects hosted by LFPH. Covid Watch, Kiel University of Applied Sciences, and US Digital Response have also joined as nonprofit associate members.
“During this grave global crisis, I’m committed to having all parts of the Linux Foundation community support LFPH,” said Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin. “Open source provides an architecture for global collaboration and that’s what’s needed to build, secure, and sustain critical components of our stressed public health infrastructure. The Linux Foundation has long enabled cross-industry collaboration in over a dozen verticals and Dan Kohn, who led the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to rapid growth that defined a multi-billion dollar industry, is an ideal choice to lead this effort.”
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