There's an interesting contradiction in this effort. It requires an insular activity that involves only a few people, but which can influence the sandbox on a large scale. I think I have just such an idea:

Station Maintenance Technician/Chief

Agents in the station would vend "Station Maintenance" missions to those WiS. These missions would involve anywhere from a single pilot to a large group of technicians. They would need to wander the stations servicing various sectors (there's a potential here for instanced game play, though it wouldn't necessarily be required... techs could easily show up needing to work on a pub's stage lighting or a docking hanger's hydraulics systems). These missions would require certain skills from those who participate (skills that exist in game already, like engineering, electronics, jury rigging, and mechanic for instance). Additionally higher levels of these skills would impart unique abilities not granted those with only basic skills (for example a tech with jury rigging 5 might be able to do a job in 30 seconds that, properly done with Mechanic 5, would take 5 minutes). The actual missions themselves could consist of various mini-games, which can have all kinds of levels of complexity: from a simple game of "memory" or (even worse) connect-the-dots, to tuning a filter network, to designing a power distribution network, to figuring out how to connect pipe A to manifold B without disconnecting very important power conduit C (whatever you do though, don't make it a "click the widget" game).

Failure to achieve these seemingly unimportant missions could have large scale consequences. Indeed, this introduces a meta-gaming element where people intentionally do something horrible: "WHAT?! Tech Team A "accidentally" cut the power conduit to the station sentry gun targeting systems, and Tech Team B just reported a medical emergency at the docking bay doors? Gee, I hope no-one outside was counting on the sentry guns or docking for the next 5 minutes while the backups kick in." How's that for violent griefing? Such actions would, of course, mangle one's faction standing with the station and probably get one fired, but it could be SO worth it.

Stations who see very little traffic may slowly begin to lose services or the quality of the service they provide. This would also help to give a more plausible reason for why a low sec station has lower refinery efficiency: those clunky maintenance bots just cant keep up with the abuse and no one's ever around the fix the big problems.

Also, usage could determine the rate of decay. therefore stations like Jita would require vastly more maintenance crews (which would justify the greater number of missions they'd likely be giving out). Additionally, the repair needs could interact with each other through a "depletion layer" just like Planetary Interaction. That could even be the basis for a more dynamic type of maintenance mission where multiple teams or individuals working separately have to interact with the "maintenance layer" in order to accomplish goals (kind of like incursions).

For example:
Team A has to get the comms relay back up and running
-> in order to do that Team B has to repair the atmosphere scrubbers in section D
-> unfortunately section D has no gravity right now and no one can figure out what the problem is
-> until Team C fixes the internal sensors
-> and if the comms arn't sorted out in the next 30 minutes, a bunch of capsuleers wont be able to talk to their mission agents for the next hour.

Thus a social dynamic is created; there's potential for immediate (face to face) interaction as well as distributed game play. The ecosystem has the potential to have wide effects on the sandbox as a whole, while still being completely optional. The places with high populations will naturally benefit, and a human landscape of well maintained (as well as seedy) stations will evolve.

P.S.
Another, optional idea that could fit into this is "Station Docking Fees" to fund the Station Maintenance Budget and create an isk sink/source dichotomy between maintenance and usage.