Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV), the community-based partnership to advance open source NFV technologies, continued its growth this week with the appointment of a director, Heather Kirksey, along with the addition of new member companies.

Kirksey comes to the OPNFV project from MongoDB, the open source NoSQL storage project. In comments on her appointment to NFV director for OPNFV, she wrote that she has “a long running passion for open source and open communities.”

She added, “With such major changes facing us as an industry, it is no wonder open source is paving the path. This change is bigger than any single company, and working collaboratively is the only way we can get there. I’ve been impressed with the passion of the OPNFV technical community, and I know that it will only grow. I’m also excited to see the passion of other communities like OpenDaylight and OpenStack and I look forward to the collaboration and cross-pollination amongst the engineers of all these projects.”

Kirksey will have plenty of opportunity to help grow a young open source community in her position at OPNFV. The organization, which is a collaborative project organized by the Linux Foundation, launched only last fall and remains very much a work in progress.

In addition to appointing Kirksey as NFV director, OPNFV announced new members this week. Enea, Korea Telecom, SK Telecom, Spirent and Xilinx have joined the project as silver members. They bring strengths in a diverse set of areas, ranging from middleware and support to telecommunications services to programmable devices, to OPNFV.