The Linux Foundation’s open source Internet of Things (IoT) group, EdgeX Foundry, is growing its membership and establishing its governing board that will guide business decisions and ensure alignment between the technical communities and members. In addition, the group has launched a series of technical training sessions designed to help developers get up to speed on the project.

EdgeX Foundry was launched back in April with the goal of standardizing industrial IoT edge computing. The Linux Foundation formed the group to develop a common framework because the IoT industry is so fragmented. That interoperability framework will be hosted within a hardware and OS-agnostic reference software platform and will allow components to be plug-and-play, which in turn will accelerate the deployment of IoT.

Since its launch, the Linux Foundation has established a governing board and a technical steering committee that will provide leadership on the code and guide the technical direction of the project. Governing board members include Brad Kemp, president of Beechwoods Software; Jason Shepherd, director of strategy and partnerships at Dell’s IoT division; John Walsh, VP of the secure technology product group for ADI; Keith Steele, CEO of IOTech; and Noah Harlan, founding partner at Two Bulls.

Members of the EdgeX technical steering committee include Steele, Walsh, and Shepherd; and Alex Newman, engineering manager at Canonical; Janko Isidorovic, co-founder of Mainflux; Michael Murray, general manager of the industrial sensing group at ADI; and Tony Espy, senior software engineer at Canonical.

At the time EdgeX Foundry launched, it had about 50 member companies, including Dell, Cumulocity, and VMware.  Today, the group added eight new members: Absolute, IoT Impact Labs, inwinSTACK, Parallel Machines, Queen’s University Belfast, RIOT, Toshiba Digital Solutions, and Tulip Interfaces.

“We are very excited to welcome these new members to our rapidly growing community. They are a geographically diverse group, but are working together to ensure that hardware, operating systems and application frameworks can all speak the same EdgeX language,” said Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT at The Linux Foundation.

Besides the new members, EdgeX Foundry also has launched a series of technical training sessions, called Tech Talks, that are intended to help new developers. The 60-minute talks are held every Thursday and include a 30-minute presentation followed by a 30-minute Q&A session. The next Tech Talk will be held July 27.