The coronavirus has had a huge impact on our society, both from a health perspective as well as economically. It is crucial that society can manage the spread of the virus while minimising the broader impact of measures put in place to contain it. To help contain the virus, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport is launching the CoronaMelder notification app on the 1st of September – CoronaMelder locally tracks contact exposures. Your phone later notifies you if you have been exposed to someone who was infectious. You can get a test for free after receiving such a message, to prevent you from unconsciously transmitting the virus to other people.

Engagement of YES!Delft

PrivateTracer was established in March as a non-profit public-private collaboration with the goal of contributing to the development of a contact tracing solution for the Netherlands. Initiated originally by Milvum, YES!Delft got involved very early on and helped to engage the wider ecosystem as well as drive the technical solution. Key parties from the YES!Delft ecosystem that got engaged included Cybermundus, Milvum, Circularise, Odyssey and the Municipality of The Hague. Together all parties worked hard on the development of the open source exposure tracking app CoronaMelder, which supports the GGD process.

“It was great to see how a young startup like Cybermundus could contribute seamlessly to this unique public-private partnership. I believe the diversity of participants, from large multinationals, public institutions and academia to startups, was one of the particular strengths that allowed us to create something valuable so rapidly. PrivateTracer demonstrated the enormous potential of a multi-stakeholder collaboration to solve the world’s most pressing challenges in an open and innovative way.”, thus Rene Honig, co-founder of Cybermundus.

The impact of PrivateTracer

It didn’t escape the notice of the Ministry that the parties behind PrivateTracer have taken up that gauntlet with great energy, professionalism and commitment. And critically the open source and transparent approach that the coalition leveraged meant that both significant elements of the PrivateTracer solution as well as core team members were integrated into the Ministrys’ delivery team.

“PrivateTracer is a collaboration that I believe we can all look back very proudly on, given the depth and professionality of the solution that we all pulled together in incredibly short (but intense) weeks. My personal thanks to all involved – it was a pleasure working with you!”, says Neil Smyth, CTO of PrivateTracer and Digital Technical Director and Blockchain Focus Area Manager of YES!Delft.

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