Station’s mission is to make working for passion accessible to everyone online, regardless of who, and where you are.

One of the most critical components of working for passion is the people. Every great community leader knows that culture is the aggregate of the people in a network. Corporations have entrusted employees as oracles of talent through the process of referrals. Over the past decade, about 30% of new hires in organizations have come from employee referrals. The gaming company Valve goes as far as encouraging every employee to put “finding great people” as their most important job.

However, the traditional hiring process as we know it no longer aligns well with the workflow of increasingly community-driven organizations and digitally-native work, where execution ability and people-orientation matter way more than institutional affiliations and overly-theoretical credentials. To quote a hiring manager of one of the most prominent infrastructure protocols in the space: “I read around 2% of the Linkedin and Email inbound I get. I spend most of my time checking Twitter DMs, who follow them, and look at their blog or Github repo.”

The social graphs native to the new genre of digital work are slowly eroding professional relationships of the past. As pseudonymity, distributed workflows, and organizational fluidity become ever more prevalent, our reliance on one another as decentralized social oracles only strengthens. We’re constantly curating our network and signaling our belief in one another through a mention on Twitter, a shout-out in Discord, or a vote on Write Race. Twitter bots are even built to signal who has publicly vouched for someone through the act of “following”.

These public endorsements evoke the concerns that the whole game will turn into a popularity contest, where the loudest voices get rewarded unproportionately to their actual contribution to the ecosystem. Some contributors, whose work is tremendously valuable but more internal-facing, get buried and unrecognized. The challenge lies in finding the right balance between signal and proof, activating every node in the network to have dynamic power, based on their roles, to influence the organizational typology. The most resilient decentralized communities are not leaderless, but are when everyone is entrusted with the capacity to become a leader, shaping the culture and future of an organization.

Some DAOs are leading the way in making the “hiring” process more transparent, participatory, and permissionless. With some proof-of-work, contributors can signal their desire to work. Rather than a top-down recruiting process, the community can collectively signal whether to “promote” the contributor and invite them to be a part of the core team. However, most of these processes are still manual, fragmented, and opaque, scattered across Notion, Snapshot, and Discord.

At Station, we believe that converting speculative interests in crypto into kinetic energy of productive collaboration is paramount for the industry’s long-term sustainability and success.

Introducing Waiting Room, the first feature of the Station Ecosystem. Waiting Room allows community members to voice their opinion on who they’d like to onboard to a community.

Initiative Board

Initiative Board highlights projects across the ecosystem so newcomers and existing contributors can stay updated and participate in the highest impact projects — allowing people to start contributing as soon as possible. An initiative can be as broad as "Season 2" or as specific as "Writing a blog post".

Decentralized “Hiring”

A community member can signal their interest in working with a potential contributor by endorsing them with endorsement tokens. Staked endorsement tokens are non-transferrable ERC-20 tokens that serve as a signal to help other community members make better decisions on who to onboard into the project.

Onboarding & Promoting Contributors

Using endorsement token staking as a signal from your community, your team can make better “promotion” decisions with their voice in mind. To onboard a contributor, invite them to the initiative and assign them a role. Terminals can customize which roles or specific individuals are allowed to invite new contributors.

Role-based NFTs

Contributor Tickets represent contributor status in a community. An invited contributor is given the ability to mint their own NFT with a pre-assigned role. Role metadata is stored on-chain to be utilized for access control, reward mechanisms, and more in the future.

Communities can fully customize the quantity and names of roles. Station’s initial release will provide a default card visual for your Contributor Ticket, with customization of the community’s logo and role names. Custom card design is possible at the protocol level and will be released to our earliest partners when ready.

For community leaders and initiative owners, you will hold a membership NFT that gives you permission to create initiatives and start recruiting around the pluriverse. You can post the initiative link on Twitter to gather contributor wallet sign-ups and additional context on why they believe they'd be a good fit for the project. The signal about someone’s competency and value-add often gets lost. Endorsement allows leaders and people working closest to them to amplify their voices.

Station looks to surface some of the most exciting initiatives for new contributors to participate in. Once you fulfill your profile, you can easily submit interests and spend your energy getting to know the community to receive Endorsements. Once the community understands that you've gathered enough Endorsements, they can issue you a non-transferable Contributor NFT that represents your official status as a contributor in the community. These Endorsements will accrue to the NFT's metadata and travel with you, whichever community you join next.

We believe the infrastructure we build to enable these on-chain social interactions will become tremendously valuable for enriching a contributor's on-chain identity, making contribution history more interoperable, and preventing spam and Sybil attacks across the Web3 ecosystem.

Station’s Newstand, our publication, has attracted some of the most brilliant minds in the space to contribute their ideas. To showcase how the Station community uses our own product to power our operations, we will use Waiting Room to bring on our next wave of writers for Newstand.

↳ If you’d like to join the Station Network as a Terminal Partner and try out Waiting Room, please join the waitlist here.

↳ If you’d like to contribute and join the ride, stay tuned for our upcoming announcements.