Gematik, the provider of digital solutions for the German health care system has chosen the open source Matrix protocol to underpin Germany’s new instant communication platform, which will be used by over 150.000 organisations, such as general practitioner offices, hospitals, and insurance organisations. The decision follows examples such as the German armed forces and France’s government adopting Matrix as the basis for their instant communication needs. The current digital communications system in the German health care sector has shown itself to not satisfy all the communication needs of…

One of the positive developments of COVID-19 was a readjustment toward the expectation that government developed apps using sensitive data should be made available as open source. The OSOR has reported about European COVID-19 tracing apps and the Belgian and Slovenian government forking the German tracing app. Yet, this expectation now seems to extend to apps adopted by the government. In Germany, the currently proprietary Luca-App, developed by the start-up Nexenio has caught the attention of multiple regional governments. The app’s purpose is to enable contact tracing at public venues and…