This talk gives an introduction into the efforts in building open digital infrastructures for public health in Germany within the project GA-Lotse since 2021. We will talk about the challenges in development, maintenance and scaling open digital infrastructures into the highly distributed world of health departments in Germany. How can you build state of the art zero trust networks – in a not so digitally advanced area like the public administration? How can you integrate privacy by design and security by design? How can you rebuild specialist government application as cloud native applications? How can leverage service mesh and data mesh concepts for many public health departments at once? And most important: how can you do this in Open Source?

GA-Lotse is a software project with the aim to assist the Hessian public health departments in their daily business with a modern and unifying software. The project started development in late 2023, but was planned to be open source since the start in late 2021.

It is available in OpenCoDE (code repository and documentation is mostly in english).