Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) will host the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative, a privacy-preserving Verifiable Credentials (VCs) effort focused on interoperability.

LFPH has also announced new Executive Director Brian Behlendorf, new public health commitments and membership investments and a new set of open source guidelines for exposure risk notifications.

The COVID-19 Credentials Initiative is a global community of more than 300 technologists, academics and healthcare professionals from more than 100 organizations working on projects that use privacy-driven verifiable credentials to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Its guiding principles include interoperability, privacy, data protection and inclusion.

The community will bring together new open standards work with existing health data standards to ensure vaccine credentials are interoperable and digitally verifiable.

Further, Brian Behlendorf will assume the role of Executive Director of LFPH, while carrying on his duties as Executive Director of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project and overseeing a variety of initiatives in blockchain, healthcare and digital identity.

The Health Service Executive Ireland, New Jersey Office of Innovation, North North Carolina Department of Human and Health Services and Boston Public Health Commission are the latest PHAs to join LFPH They are the ultimate consumers of the technologies being built by LFPH and so their contributions will dramatically accelerate adoption and innovation.

LFPH is also announcing new member MotionMob and that WeHealth, the company that implements Covid Watch, is upgrading its membership and is now a Founding General Member. Other founding members include Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent and VMware.

LFPH launched with two hosted exposure notifications projects, COVID Shield and COVID Green, to advance phone-based alerts that people can receive to inform them that they’ve been exposed to someone diagnosed with COVID-19.

The Exposure Notification System (ENS) provided by Apple and Google has a configurable component, a risk score, which allows health authorities to specify which types or levels of exposures should trigger a notification.