Nobody gets handed a team on day one — including the people who started this. Here's how standing actually works, and what a project needs before it's allowed to recruit one.
Everyone starts in the same place, no matter what they've built before — or whether they've built anything at all. Standing comes from showing up and putting in real work on someone else's project, and for most people that's also where the actual skills get learned. Nobody runs classes here; the build itself is the curriculum.
You came to a build, even without a skill to offer yet. You're in the group, on the radar, learning by watching and handing people things.
You made a meaningful contribution to a project — not logged hours, an actual dent in the work. Welding, code, design, hauling, whatever it took, learned on the job if you had to.
You've earned the standing to pitch your own project and ask other people to trust you with their time.
There's no hour counter and no checklist to game. "Meaningful contribution" is a judgment call the crew makes together — did the project actually move forward because you were there.
This isn't gatekeeping the dream — it's protecting the time of everyone who'd join it. A project earns the right to recruit when it clears a few honest bars:
It can actually start within real constraints. Not contingent on first finding funding, a patron, or permission from someone who isn't in the room.
There's a first concrete step smaller than a weekend. If the first move is itself a multi-month undertaking, the project isn't scoped yet — it's a vision.
"Done" can be described, even roughly. The person pitching it can say what it looks like finished, even if the details get figured out along the way.
The skills it needs either exist in the room or someone's willing to learn them. Not a hard requirement that every skill is already covered — just that nobody's pretending a gap isn't there.
Active and forming projects, what they need, and how to get in — that lives on its own page so it can actually grow into a real directory instead of three sample cards.
Browse the project directory