This blog is a high-level summary of the interview with Graham Dodge, President of PathCheck Foundation, at the Radio Entrepreneurs podcast hosted by Jeffrey Davis.
Graham discusses PathCheck’s mission to address the need to develop open source privacy-preserving software that people can use for COVID-19 tracking, contact tracing, exposure notifications and vaccine notification. The software developed at PathCheck has already been used to ship over 1 billion credentials! This was done through integration with vaccine verification and exposure notification apps from around the world. Graham also shares his experience of taking on the role of President at PathCheck and applying what he learned from being the founder of SickWeather.
With the coronavirus mutating to become less severe over each iteration, virologists believe that COVID-19 will become endemic alongside influenza, RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), HFMD (Hand Foot, and Mouth Disease), etc. However, this will still have a significant impact on society. For instance, U.S. businesses lose billions of dollars in productivity every year due to influenza.
Going forward, PathCheck is working on building an open platform to help people know what these diseases are, where they are emerging, and how to avoid them. This platform will leverage the power of crowdsourcing. The code will be open source and available to other nations and agencies for deployment (similar to the earlier integration of PathCheck software with COVID-19 vaccine verification and exposure notification apps). The idea is to use this code in between pandemics and help stave off the next one by informing the public of risk in real-time.
Graham also discusses the importance of PathCheck being a non-profit and how the foundation maintains sustainable revenue streams while keeping its code open source. Check out the full podcast at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeZei9kmSbM
Also, if you’re interested in joining our efforts at PathCheck Foundation, head over to — tiny.cc/pathcheckslack