Linux Foundation Public Health: A New Initiative Launched To Fight COVID-19

While the world is still going through the century’s worst pandemic COVID-19, we’re also experiencing an upsurge in the usage and role of open technology.

We’ve witnessed several collaborations between tech communities and health experts in the fight against coronavirus. Following the same, Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) is the newest initiative by the Linux Foundation to help public health authorities (PHAs).

Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH)

The Linux Foundation is a very well-known non-profit organization that helps to grow and build the open-source community by supporting software projects such as Linux, Node.js, Hyperledger, and Kubernetes.

Now, to fight against COVID-19 and future epidemics, Linux Foundation has launched a new LFPH initiative to bring together open-source developers and public health authorities (PHAs) in one place.

Initially, LFPH will focus on exposure notification applications to help PHA in testing, tracing, and isolation activities. Under the hood, apps will use exposure notification APIs developed by Google and Apple.

COVID Green And COVID Shield

Subsequently, LFPH project currently includes two exposure notification project — COVID Shield and COVID Green.

COVID Shield is developed by a volunteer team of more than 40 developers from Shopify, along with members of Ontario and Canadian Digital Services. It is in the process of being deployed to Canada and multiple U.S. states.

COVID Green is developed by a team at NearForm on behalf of the Irish Government. It has already been deployed by Ireland’s Health Services Executive and achieved extraordinarily high adoption of over 1/3rd of the country’s adults.

Both apps are open-source and hence available for other PHAs as well to use and customize as they want. Additionally, other tech communities can also join LFPH to support PHA financially or technically.

As of now, LFPH has seven Premier members that include Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent, and VMware. If you want to keep track of all applications, projects, and members under LFPH, visit landscape.