Linux Foundation Public Health Welcomes New Projects and Members to Advance Public Health, Safely Reopen Amid COVID-19

Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH), the leading organization for hosting and nurturing open source technology for the benefit of public health initiatives, today announced 11 new members, three new hosted projects, and its growing leadership in the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) to advance verifiable credentials and combat COVID-19.

As vaccines become more widely available, many countries have considered deploying a COVID credential or health pass to assist in safely reopening their economies. LFPH's COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI), whose Ecosystems Director Kaliya "IdentityWoman" Young co-chairs the Interoperability Working Group of GHPC, will help ensure that these solutions are privacy-protecting, interoperable, and built on open standards, to will better enable rapid and wide adoption.

To accelerate and strengthen its COVID response, LFPH continues to grow, welcoming three new projects and 11 members including new general members Affinidi, Consensys Health, Dimagi, MTX, and Blockchain Labs, the developer of South Korea's national vaccination certificate system, to further engage and connect the right people and organizations across geographies and disciplines. New associate members include the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the CIO Strategy Council, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the Washington State Department of Health, and the Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research.

The new projects are:

Cardea: Launched by Indicio.Tech, Cardea provides an easily verifiable, trustworthy, unalterable proof of health tests or vaccination that can be shared in a privacy-preserving way. Cardea easily integrates with existing health systems to ensure trusted data sources for credentials and uses decentralized identity technology to enable better control of data for individuals. Cardea recently announced its first reference implementation in partnership with SITA for the Aruba government.

MedCreds: MedCreds, developed by and contributed to LFPH by ProofMarket, allows medical authorities to directly issue test and vaccination results in the form of verifiable credentials to individuals in a digital wallet. Wallet holders can also request peer-to-peer credentials from others using the MedCreds system. MedCreds had its initial implementation in the film industry, allowing compliance officers to verify workers' COVID test results with their consent before they come on site.

Herald: LFPH is also glad to welcome Herald, an exposure notification protocol in production with the governments of Australia and Alberta, Canada and is in use on over 7.6 million phones worldwide. Herald is a VMware-originated project and officially joined LFPH in February.

"The world needs verifiable credentials to reopen as safely and quickly as possible, and these projects are front and center in that effort," said Brian Behlendorf, General Manager of Blockchain, Healthcare, and Identity for the Linux Foundation. "A larger, more collaborative LFPH will provide a nurturing home for them to flourish for the benefit of all, not only to help us navigate this pandemic but future threats as well. We look forward to working with our new members on these projects and ones already in motion, ushering in the next wave of pandemic fighting technology that will help us seamlessly and safely move about our lives." 

Launched in the summer of 2020, LFPH hosts five projects, and includes 29 members. As part of the Linux Foundation, LFPH is uniquely qualified to help public health authorities and their partners take advantage of open source innovation. The Linux Foundation has more than 20 years of experience with open source development with participation from every Fortune 100 company and more than 40,000 developers worldwide who build open source software, communities, and companies.

LFPH is hosting a webinar this week to share more about the new projects and discuss some of the most important challenges around verifiable credentials.