Our Journey to Open Source

Not too long ago, Northwestern Mutual (NM) took a bold step forward and started contributing to open source projects. Big deal, you might say. After all, open source has been around for a long time and has millions of contributors. The “big deal” isn’t the contributions themselves (although some are pretty fantastic). The big deal is that Northwestern Mutual—a 160-year-old, highly regulated business focused on managing risk—made a change. Our company embraced innovation, adopted agile practices and started sharing our knowledge with the technical community. This is significant because not many other companies like ours have been willing—or able—to contribute back to open source projects. How did we do it? Let’s walk through the steps we took to help our organization get comfortable contributing to open source. If your company is just starting its open…