Basecamp's program structure is built on two open-source frameworks: the PIE Cookbook from Portland and the AOS Hubs model from the And Other Stuff collective. Both are public, forkable, and designed to be adapted.
The PIE Cookbook is an open-source guide for building startup accelerators, created by PIE (Portland Incubator Experiment). PIE began in 2009 as a collaboration between Portland's startup community and Wieden+Kennedy, the largest privately held creative agency in the world. Over nearly a decade, PIE evolved from a coworking space to a community hub to an early-stage startup accelerator — and then open-sourced everything it learned along the way.
The Cookbook is not a rigid curriculum. It is, in PIE's own words, "a map for your road trip" — a record of what worked, what failed, and why, organized so that anyone building a community-driven program can adapt it to their own context. PIE describes itself as "a community development and ecosystem building program disguised as a startup accelerator," and that framing is central to how Basecamp uses it.
We believe that each and every community — with the right tools — has the potential to assist and accelerate its most promising folks further and faster toward success.
— PIE CookbookBasecamp adapts four core elements from the PIE Cookbook to fit a mixed-discipline residency in Vancouver rather than a tech-only accelerator in Portland.
PIE's central insight is that mentorship works best when the mentor's job is to help someone get unstuck on a specific, immediate problem — not to deliver wisdom from on high. PIE's rules for mentors include "you don't have to know everything," "be honest, not nice," and "you can't and shouldn't fix everything." At Basecamp, contributors follow the same discipline: show up, help with what is in front of the resident right now, and leave. The resident still decides.
PIE spent years as a coworking space and community hub before it ever ran an accelerator cohort. The Cookbook is explicit that attempting to start an accelerator without an existing community is "a recipe for complete failure." Basecamp is grounded in the same principle: the program is embedded in Vancouver's existing creative, entrepreneurial, open-source, and university communities, not parachuted in from outside.
PIE documents the predictable emotional ebb and flow of an accelerator class — the initial excitement, the mid-program trough, the pressure of demo day. Basecamp's weekly cadence is designed around this arc, with peer accountability, structured check-ins, and demo day preparation timed to match the emotional reality of building something from scratch under a deadline.
The PIE Cookbook itself is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) and published on GitHub. Basecamp follows the same practice: every framework, playbook, and documented artifact produced by residents and contributors is published in the Basecamp Commons Repository under CC BY-SA 4.0. The program improves in the open.
AOS Hubs is the public operating manual for And Other Stuff (AOS) — a community-driven collective that helps founders, contributors, and freedom-tech builders work together. AOS takes its name from Nostr ("Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays") and focuses on what it calls "the other stuff" — the unexpected ideas, tools, and communities that emerge when people can build, connect, and experiment without asking for permission.
The AOS Hubs model organizes support into three interconnected spaces. Basecamp integrates all three into the residency experience.
Where AOS walks alongside projects and founders as they design, build, and ship. At Basecamp, the Foundry is the core residency experience — the weekly rhythm of standups, office hours, peer skill shares, and demo days. Contributors don't manage residents; they walk alongside them.
Where AOS convenes working groups, hackathons, and conversations to explore questions together. At Basecamp, the Lab manifests as cohort-driven programming — design sprints, crit sessions, Open Space unconferences, and cross-disciplinary experiments that residents propose and run themselves.
Where AOS connects projects with people and services that help them move faster. At Basecamp, the Studio is the contributor network and the ecosystem connections — the curated introductions, the Canadian funding navigation, and the Vancouver community access that residents plug into during their stay.
The defining characteristic of the AOS model — and the reason Basecamp integrates it — is the "walk alongside" posture. AOS explicitly rejects the hierarchical relationship between program operator and participant. The Hubs model describes a community where founders, contributors, and service providers work together transparently, with the operating manual itself published in public for anyone to fork, adapt, or critique.
This aligns directly with Basecamp's circular economy principle: everyone who contributes value should receive value. Contributors are not volunteers donating time to grateful residents. They are practitioners who gain network access, co-authorship credit, community belonging, and future residency opportunities in exchange for specific, bounded contributions.
PIE provides the operational grammar — how to structure a cohort, how to recruit and manage mentors, how to build toward demo day, how to handle the emotional arc. AOS provides the relational grammar — how to organize support without hierarchy, how to walk alongside instead of lead from above, how to build a commons that everyone stewards together.
Neither framework was designed for what Basecamp is doing. PIE was built for a tech-startup accelerator in Portland, Oregon. AOS was built for a freedom-tech collective supporting open-protocol builders. Basecamp is a mixed-discipline residency for creators, entrepreneurs, and community builders in Vancouver, BC. The adaptation is deliberate and documented.
Neither PIE nor AOS was designed for cohorts that include software founders, visual artists, civic technologists, and community organizers in the same room. Basecamp's crit rotation — cycling between Pixar-style braintrust, art-school group crit, and writer's workshop formats — is an original adaptation that ensures no single discipline dominates the culture.
Both source frameworks are US-based. Basecamp integrates Canadian realities: the SR&ED tax credit, IRAP and PacifiCan funding, Futurpreneur, Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants, PIPEDA and CASL compliance, and the structural differences of building for a market one-tenth the size of the US. Every resident leaves with a Canadian funding map specific to their project.
HI Jericho Beach sits on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, whose MST Development Corporation is redeveloping the adjacent Jericho Lands. Basecamp treats Indigenous partnership not as an addition to the program but as a ground condition of the site — integrating Indigenous economic development networks, honoring knowledge-holder protocols, and reserving resident seats for Indigenous builders.
Basecamp extends both frameworks with a reciprocity architecture drawn from mutual aid network theory, Elinor Ostrom's commons governance principles, and cooperative economics. The program tracks structured contributions and returns through a Contributor Ledger while leaving relational exchanges untracked — balancing accountability with the warmth that makes communities actually work.
Both frameworks are open source. Read them, fork them, critique them.
PIE Cookbook on GitHub — licensed under CC BY 4.0.
AOS Hubs on GitHub — published as a public operating manual.
PIE PDX — the Portland Incubator Experiment.
And Other Stuff — technology for human thriving.