Skip to content

Open-⁠Source Incubator

Exploded diagram of a straw wall assembly, labelling exterior cladding, rainscreen, plywood sheathing, staggered wood framing with packed straw infill, electrical chase strips and interior sheathing across a five and a half inch cavity.
Five CASBA members standing in a row against a stacked straw bale wall

CASBA has a long tradition of open-source information-sharing, research, and mutual support; and deep roots in the natural building movement. As a result we are uniquely positioned to help scale the movement in two ways:

  • Providing open-source materials knowledge and best practices to support natural and biobased product development
  • Supporting businesses oriented toward natural and biobased building methods. We want to help more bio-based businesses flourish!

Historically we have played this role to a degree through consultations, mentoring, resource assistance, and our invaluable network of practitioners ready to work with new products and companies. We feel that there is now a new opportunity to increase our impact in this regard by developing member benefits for business support through more focused research collaboration with product developers.

We approach incubation from an open-source, bioregional perspective, building on our community's history of freely sharing knowledge and working toward a symbiotic relationship with the region we inhabit, and on which we rely. To us this means scaling biobased material practice on the shoulders of resilient construction processes, rather than black-boxed, or universal solutions. CASBA sees bio-based business and product incubation as essential to our goals for a regenerative building movement.