Amish Barn Raising

from ChiefArchitect:

An AmishBarnRaising is a communal activity to put up a barn for part of the community (as seen in 'Witness' with Harrison Ford and the video to 'Amish Paradise' by Weird Al Yankovic). Amish Barns are rather lovely, functional structures (a little like shaker furniture), I was wondering how they got that way.

Then see http://web.archive.org/web/20020202012640/www.discovery.com/area/exploration/amish/barnraising/main.html.

We used to use this term back in the game programming days to describe an activity in which we got large numbers of personnel from other groups, some more qualified and some less, to contribute to the project on a single day. For example, nearing a release date, we might have an AmishBarnRaising to test the release. It helps to bring people unfamiliar with the project in, at low resource cost, to ward off the blinders you get when you've been creating or testing a project for a long time.

Per the book Notes on the Synthesis of Form by ChristopherAlexander, this is an example of "unselfconscious design". That means nobody has the role of ChiefArchitect, or needs to appear heroic enough to put this barn on their résumé. -- PhlIp