The Oregon Experiment: Six Principles

Dear Reader,

The Oregon Experiment is a quick read worth reading more slowly. Since this book is so important to understanding the VISTA software lifecycle, let's examine what it can teach us about VISTA.

Here are the book's six principles:

Specifically, we believe that the process of building and planning in a community will create an environment which meets human needs only if it follows six principles of implementation:

1. The principle of organic order.
2. The principle of participation.
3. The principle of piecemeal growth.
4. The principle of patterns.
5. The principle of diagnosis.
6. The principle of coordination.

We recommend that the University of Oregon, and any other institution or community which has a single owner, and a centralized budget, adopt these six principles to replace its conventional master planning and conventional budgetary procedures, to provide the administrative resources which will guarantee people the right to design their own places, and to set in motion the democratic processes which will ensure their flexible continuation.

For the sake of concreteness, and to give you an overview of the book, we now outline these six principles.

1. The principle of organic order.
Planning and construction will be guided by a process which allows the whole to emerge gradually from local acts.

2. The principle of participation.
All decisions about what to build, and how to build it, will be in the hands of the users.

3. The principle of piecemeal growth.
The construction undertaken in each budgetary period will be weighed overwhelmingly towards small projects.

4. The principle of patterns.
All design and construction will be guided by a collection of communally adopted planning principles called patterns.

5. The principle of diagnosis.
The well being of the whole will be protected by an annual diagnosis which explains, in detail, which spaces are alive and which ones dead, at any given moment in the history of the community.

6. The principle of coordination.
Finally, the slow emergence of organic order in the whole will be assured by a funding process which regulates the stream of individual projects put forward by users.

Next, let's examine these principles in detail, beginning with the principle of organic order.

Yours truly,
Rick