Baking PIE

The PIE Cookbook’s Baking PIE section covers the program’s context and history — Portland, the open-source ethos, and how the accelerator evolved. We borrow that section’s stance for one reason: the methodology is public, so anyone can run it. You don’t need to be admitted to a program. You don’t need a cohort. The playbook is the thing.

From the source

This adapts the Baking PIE → Portland / Open source / History of PIE subsections of the PIE Cookbook. The cookbook is the canonical account; this page explains why we build on it.

Why open source, all the way down

An accelerator that keeps its playbook private can only help the people in the room. An accelerator that publishes its playbook becomes infrastructure: any collective, anywhere, can pick it up and adapt it. That is the same bet this catalog makes about software — the value isn’t in hoarding the method, it’s in making it legible and reusable.

It’s also why the exclusion policy matters here and not just as a preference. If the goal is shared infrastructure for communities that often operate under real adversarial pressure, then “open source” can’t stop at the license file. The supply chain has to be clean too — no quiet dependency on the ad-tech and surveillance stacks the communities are trying to route around.

What you inherit by starting here

• A structure that’s been used to take many ideas from zero to shipped.
• A vocabulary (kitchen prep, ingredients, the oven, recipes) that keeps non-developers oriented.
• A catalog of vetted ingredients so the “what do I build with” question has an answer you can trust.

Continue to Kitchen Prep → to take stock of what you’re working with.