The Linux Foundation is joining the battle against COVID-19 with a program aimed at building on top of the foundational contact tracing work being done jointly by Google LLC and Apple Inc.

The Linux Foundation Public Health initiative is launching with seven premier members and two hosted projects targeted at notifying public health officials of coronavirus exposure.

The initiative is headed by Dan Kohn (pictured), who is moving over from his previous role as executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which nurtures the Kubernetes container orchestration platform and its large ecosystem. Kohn said he didn’t hesitate to shift away from heading up the thriving CNCF with its 560 members to a much smaller operation because of the life-saving opportunities.

“Public health authorities have had radical level of underinvestment for the past couple of decades,” he said. “We want to support anything that contributes to helping them do their jobs better.”

Spending on local public health departments has dropped by more than 18% since 2010, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. A resident of lower Manhattan, Kohn said he saw the devastation of the early stages of the pandemic firsthand and lost an uncle to the disease.

The LFPH is focusing on public health applications rather than first responders or care providers. One of its first hosted projects is COVID Shield, a privacy-focused notification app intended for use by governments that want to launch their own exposure notification systems. It was developed by volunteers at Shopify Inc. and is being rolled out in Canada. COVID Green was developed by NearForm Ltd. for the Irish Government and has already been adopted by one-third of the country’s adult population.

Initially, the focus is on project that will plug in to the Google Apple Exposure Notification or GAEN platform, which is expected to be adopted widely around the world. GAEN is a foundation for contact tracing, which is a technique used to control the spread of infection by isolating people have been exposed to a disease in tracking down others with whom they may have come in contact.

The GAEN platform uses a mobile app on a user’s phone and a Bluetooth Low Energy signal to communicate continously with nearby mobile devices and exchange anonymous tokens, even if the app is not active. If a person subsequently becomes infected, the app can notify others who may have come in contact and deliver instructions on how to protect themselves and others. LFPH projects are is initially focused on extensions to the anonymous platform that can be used in cases where the identity of an infected person needs to be know, such as in the workplace.

Google and Apple have open-sourced parts of the technology but “no public health authority has the capability of taking the upstream open-source code and customizing it for their use,” Kohn said. “They need to partner with an IT vendor.”

The LFPH aims to start a certification program similar to the one the CNCF created in the Kubernetes world and to certify organizations that have expertise in the technologies it supports. “Over time we want to have a stable of service providers who understand the code base and the priorities,” Kohn said. “If your vendor is looking for subcontractor there will be groups we can recommend.”

The initiative won’t host code but will provide services such as funding of security audits, documentation help, marketing and legal assistance to the projects it adopts. Fees are on a sliding scale beginning at $2,000 for a small company that already belongs to the Linux Foundation and topping out at $170,000 for premier members. Among the benefits the group cites on its membership page are the “many billions of dollars [that will be] invested in public health IT infrastructure over the next few years.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE