the talentlayer manifesto - enabling freedom through work reputation

Reputation and the ability to find work are deeply intertwined.

What controls your ability to find new work? Your reputation and the systems it relies on.

Scaling reputation

With a good reputation in your city, country, industry, or online ecosystem, finding new work is easy.

Verifiable work is the bedrock of reputation. This is why you have the strongest reputations with people you have worked with directly or with a few degrees of separation; it is easy to find people to attest that you have the ability to deliver - they’ve seen you do it or know the person who’s seen you do it. Unfortunately, these sorts of reputations don’t scale beyond Dunbar’s Number.

This is also why freelancing and online work platforms have been able to create such powerful reputation networks; reputations are based on almost exclusively verifiable work that has been done within the platform ecosystem. The platform itself becomes the attester that you have delivered work - because people trust the platform, these reputations are more scaleable, but also more vulnerable. At the will of a company’s internal policy change, a geography’s new sanctions law, or a platform’s bankruptcy, your work reputation can be obliterated from existence.

Is it possible to scale reputation past Dunbar’s number without a middleman?

How can we prove without a doubt that work has been done, in a way that is universally recognized?

Freedom through work sovereignty

Freedom /ˈfriːdəm/

a. The quality or state of being free: such as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action

b. Sovereignty; Work Sovereignty, Financial Sovereignty, Geographic Sovereignty

Work Sovereignty is having complete ownership and control of your ability to find new work through a self-custodied and interoperable work reputation. It enables Financial Sovereignty (ability to store and grow wealth without intermediaries) and Geographic Sovereignty (ability to change your location when needed) through allowing one to acquire wealth, regardless of one's life situation.

Work Sovereignty will unleash a whole new era of freedom for humanity.

Tools for work sovereignty

The reputation system that enables Work Sovereignty must be…

Verifiable: Based on verifiable work and reviews

Unconfiscateable: Self-owned and self-custodied, unable to be taken away from you

Incorruptible: Unable to be edited, immutable

Accessible: Available to anyone

Interoperable: Easily integrated and widely recognized

Community-maintained: Open-source and decentralized

Building the future of work

TalentLayer is an interoperable, decentralized, infrastructure layer for building talent marketplaces, reputation systems, and the future of work. You can build anything from freelance marketplaces to ride-share apps on it's system.

At its core, TalentLayer leverages blockchain technology to provide a verifiable, unconfiscateable, incorruptible, accessible, interoperable, and community-owned work reputation system. Just as important, TalentLayer facilitates indexing and interoperable transactions between platforms; helping users access more opportunities with less effort.

A user’s TalentLayer ID reputation grows through the user’s interactions on any TalentLayer integrated marketplaces and work platforms. A TalentLayer identity can hire or be hired. Multiple TalentLayer identities create associations representing DAOs, companies, dev shops, and other forms of collectives. Associations can hire or be hired.

TalentLayer will transform the talent marketplace ecosystem into a sustainable, interoperable, integrated economy of scale.

It takes a village

TalentLayer Core's open-source software is currently in development. We're rallying early contributors, partner organizations, and allies.

If you share our vision, and want to contribute to the TalentLayer ecosystem, DM us on Twitter. Let's build the future together.