Linux Foundation Public Health for contact tracing

It is called Linux Foundation Public Health and is an initiative that has its roots in the open source world and which aims to provide benefits to the whole world thanks to the open code through the contact tracing apps. The names at stake clearly clarify how important such a project can be: the initiative was born with the support of Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent and VMware.

Contact tracing for all

The LFPH initiative starts from contact tracing, focusing on what are the "Google Apple Exposure Notification" (ie the same platform on which the Italian Immuni was developed), but the The goal is much broader: we intend to provide countries that may need it with a much wider budget and to organize everything that is testing, tracking and isolating citizens.

To catalyze this open source development, the Linux Foundation Public Health is building a global community of leading technology companies, health authorities p public, epidemiologists and other public health specialists, privacy and security experts and individual developers. We are delighted to launch two very important open source projects and at the same time we think enabling collaboration can be our biggest impact in fighting this pandemic

Dan Kohn, LFPH General Manager



These are the first two projects, the code of which is immediately available on GitHub:

Covid Shield Covid Green All the countries that will need support in the adoption of a system of contact tracing will be able to draw to the codes, to the advice and experience of LFPH, USA including: where contact tracing has not yet been approached with this initiative it will be possible to draw on resources software put together to build in the battle to the Covid an alliance really without boundaries.

The initiative incorporates from the outset the TCN Coalition, a group that had pursued the same purpose as early as April 2020, and which now converges in the new LFPH as a natural evolution of their work. The true edge is in the synergies that collaboration can express, putting together the resources of all to arrive at solutions as more cross-cutting and shared as possible.

“ The open source provides an architecture for a global collaboration, “ explains the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin: the birth of an alliance between the world of technology and the world of public health , putting the first at the disposal of the second in a moment in which the pandemic represents a threat to the entire world and in many cases the institutions are disarmed in front of the pace of the outbreaks. One thing is clear: tracing and insulation can be basic weapons, as well as the open source code can be language able to interact to all on the basis of the same code.

Source: PR Newswire