Portola Institute

The Portola Institute was a "nonprofit educational foundation" founded in Menlo Park, California in 1966 by Dick Raymond. Raymond had previously worked in the urban planning division of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, where his specialties included land use, recreational economics, and community development.^[1][2] Much of the Portola Institute's function and influence developed increasingly in the direction of environmental and social sustainability.

What set the Portola Institute’s mission apart from that of conventional educational institutions was the way in which the practicality principle played out. The Institute was never intended to be involved with academic credits and did not confer diplomas or degrees. Rather, it provided diverse opportunities for individuals to learn in some area of personal fascination, through exploring and doing. One significant aspect of Portola was the issuing of publications, and these were intended to inform people about how to do something or make something — that is, to actually apply technical principles.^[3]

J. Richard Suchman, a psychologist from the faculty of the University of Illinois, became active in a project of the Institute during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Suchman's prior experience included doing research on fostering investigation and critical thinking among elementary-school students.^[4] Using Portola funding, he organized the Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory. Computer education pioneer Bob Albrecht launched Portola's computer division, the subsequent development of his People's Computer Company being aided by his experience in the Institute.^[5] Through the Portola Institute, Raymond later lent financial support to efforts such as the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Portola was the publisher of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog beginning with the first issue in 1968.^[6] That issue noted that the Catalog was one division of the Portola Institute",^[2][7] and that other activities of the Institute included "simulation games for classroom use,[and] new approaches to music education."^[8]

Commenting on the Institute's fresh vision, writer Maggie Engler opined that Portola's computer-related influence went beyond the experiments and pilot projects. She offered the view that once other Bay Area efforts were made to broaden personal-computer familiarity, it furthered “the Portola Institute goal of computer literacy for every age” — adults, of course, as well as younger people.^[9]

Carol Goodell, PhD, was co-founder of a partnership called Real World Learning, Inc. She was an educator and education theorist whose husband worked for IBM. Raymond learned of Goodell's work and invited her into Portola’s late-1960s collaborations. Some thirty years later, writer June Morrall drew out some of Goodell's memories of those years, and she related that many of the eager idea people attracted to the Institute were young. Goodell said that Dick Raymond embodied “a nice mix of compassion, enthusiasm and realism. Raymond’s role was to ferret out the most doable ideas.”^[10]

Quoting author Theodore Roszak's From Satori to Silicon Valley, Hallie Rose Scott commented on the Institute's inherent goal:

Portola aimed to "scale-down, democratize, and humanize our hypertrophic technological society" by serving as a platform for smaller initiatives and by providing young students with instruction in computers and later, portable video cameras.^[11]

Stewart Brand's project, the surprisingly successful editions of the Whole Earth Catalogs (WECs), was directly in line with Portola's objectives. Subsequent publishing ventures of the Institute included Richard Merrill and Thomas Gage's technical Energy Primer: Solar, Water, Wind, and Biofuels, considered, for its time (1974), a fairly comprehensive introduction; Portola (in cooperation with Delta) published a second edition four years later.^[12]

As an offshoot of the Portola Institute, and its financial success with the WEC, Raymond and Stewart Brand collaborated to form the Point Foundation."^[2]

• Brand, Stewart. Whole Earth Catalog. Fall 1968.
• Turner, Fred From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press. 2006. ISBN 0-226-81741-5.