So this idea was started by @thecryptofiend as a means to imrpove relations between end users and witnesses. It was started 2 years ago here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@thecryptofiend/witness-questionnaire-a-solution-for-voter-confusion

It didn't end up getting as much witness involvement as I'd thought it might of, so in light of my new project this is right up my alley. I will be finding things like this and filling them out and encouraging other witnesses to do the same and to join my newly founded group where you can list all this info and be an awesome witness! I've created some of these and taken some from what others have put together, but I am open to answer anything and add useful questions to the overall comprehensive questionnaire for witnesses too.

The discord is Witness Communications Assembly (WCA) - https://discord.gg/TxGVWXZ

If you navigate to the channel #official-comprehensive-witness-questionnaire you can then find the updated version of this questionnaire to answer as well! Please pass it on and encourage other witnesses to participate!

Anwyays time to dive in!

A) Technical Questions

1) In a few sentences or less please explain the role of a witness in the Steemit/Steem ecosystem as you understand it.

We are here to help people on the network, manage the infrastructure and blockchain mining and utility. As a witness for me, my main role is to provide guidance and education to those on platforms on Steem (mostly Steemit) and contribute to and highlight projects that will positively impact Steem/Steemit etc. moving forward.

2) What are the most important qualities for a witness to have?

At first I'd say technically savvy, but you could always have someone help you with that. In terms of most important traits, I think the most important would be honesty, integrity driven, empathetic, good sense of communication, precise, transparent, and reliable.

3) How do you fulfil those qualities?

I'd like to think I match up to having all of these things and empowering others to strive to have these qualities as well in everything that I do. (my vision, goals, day-to-day activities)

4) Is there anything beyond this that you feel makes you a better witness candidate than the average person?

I strongly am against government intervention and really want to see Steem blossom and have global representation for witnesses and elevate the community by sharing the wealth. I have a very altruistic outlook and I believe my ambition and dedication will help me represent minnows and smaller voices on the platform that lack representation and I am highly motivated by that fact.

1. What kind of hardware setup are you using and is it your own local hardware or rented?

For my server I have just begun to upgrade to this after realizing I didn't meet the requirements previously:

My personal setup in general is a pretty well setup desktop with 4 monitors, an external sound interface, 24 GB DDR4 RAM, 1 TB HDD, 250 GB SDD, Intel Core i7-8700k CPU @ 3.70 GHz with a Geoforce 1080x overclocked 4GB graphics card.

6) What if any contingencies do you have in case of an emergency or server failure?

Currently, none aside from working from home and checking often. In the future with more support and available funds I would make a backup server.

7) Do you think the current compensation for a witness is fair? If not what do you think would be fair compensation?

I think it's fair enough, if the compensation were too high for any witness, everyone would run for the sake of profit, which isn't the point.

8) What percentage (or fixed amount) of witness earnings should be kept and what percent invested back into the Steem platform?

I think it should be scaled based on the current earnings. For example if you have 10 million Steem, you don't really need 500 Steem daily.However, if you are getting maybe 1 Steem a day you may have more need to keep all of that 1. I don't have an exact percentage I think there "should" be only because I'm so new to witnessing and don't have a fully set answer for this one yet. I don't think I will ever know the correct amount, I believe it will continually change and I think the community should help poll to decide.

9) How do you intend to use your witness earnings?

To help highlight more educational posts and reward those authors, empower more minnows, work on infrastructure for my WCA project, upgrade and fund the witness node and create more to add to investing power. I'd like to help with making Steem more widely adopted and creating projects around that as well as getting a project going for verifying witnesses, and then another for verifying users. You can see all my current projects on my WCA witness channel #scottcbusiness - https://discord.gg/TQuaNjE

I also obviously plan to use them to pay back the money I'm investing into the witness node and ideally pay for it moving forward. I'm using @privex so I have to keep paying using cryptocurrency.

B) Current Witness Questions

1) What challenges or problems have you faced in your role as witness?

Given I've just started, just mostly getting started haha. I had to upgrade my witness node, so I'm doing that now so I can properly get started. I expect I'll have a bit of trouble with the technicalities, but my experience and education should prove to be useful there.

2) What other types of decisions do you think as a witness you should be involved in voting on?

Many, if we are being voted in by the community, we should vote on and potentially be open to polling (not that we'd have to be enforced to follow, but to gain insight). I think that way people would be more comfortable with witnesses making a wider range of influential decisions.

3) Are there any changes to the witness/mining system or structure that you feel would improve the system? Why?

Currently, I'm not as investing in the mining system as I am representing people on the blockchain as more of a people's politician. I would say I'm a representative for minnows and a witness second, miner third. For now I'd say we need to remove inactive votes, improve transparency, insights, and communication. I plan to address a lot of this with the contributions I will be making and projects I'll support.

4) Thoughts on more decentralization on Steemit or more centralization

I recently talked with @omitaylor about how I think there should be more limits on the way people have been using tags and she thinks it's more about they need less restrictions so that lead to whether or not we are trying decentralize or centralize Steemit. To this point I think in some way a compromise is needed both way, like 10 tags and 5 must be informational, while the other 5 can be branded tags or whatever to be apart of curation trails and other things that are age old pillars I wouldn't want to disturb. Personally I won't support tag abuse as it ruins the indexing of the platform. This is more of a Steemit problem than anything though. Either way I will dedicate to informational tags.

5) Are you for developing new subplatforms and apps on the Steem blockchain or are you more for staying with Steemit

I'm open for everyone to go crazy and explore and have fun with it. I personally work with @Steepshot and stay unbiased from a witness perspective, and I support @Dlive, @Esteem, @busy.org and the other major platforms out there doing awesome work on the blockchain.

6) What are your thoughts on self voting?

I'm not super against self voting, however like witness profits I believe everything should scale within reason. Currently self-voting just gives my post a tiny boost of like 0.13 cents or so and it doesn't do much. However, if you can give out hundreds of dollars, it's pretty selfish to self vote a lot. Especially self voting comments just for profit, that is definitely wrong in my opinion and I don't support it. I definitely think people should curate and share the wealth using a much higher percentage of their voting power for supporting awesome projects and highlighting hardworking individuals.

7) What are your thoughts on vote selling?

Originally I thought vote selling was great, but the problem with it is the regulation of the content to ensure it's quality. I think with a very reliable vote seller it may be feasible, but currently the state of it is a bit out of hand and there are too many highly promoted low quality posts. I do a small amount of it to earn a little bit and because I trust @MinnowBooster, and previously I would give out votes to my followers on their comments to show that I appreciate them, but I realize that the most effective way to use my vote power in a way that isn't biased is to just manually curate great content.

8) What is your sentiment towards using bid bots?

I'm okay with people using bid bots, the problem is when content is overly promoted to trend for too long like promoting a post with hundreds or even thousands of SBD/STEEM. Also the issue where low quality posts are able to hit the trending page because of bid bots. I think the solution lies in ensuring low quality posts aren't promoted or are very limited in how much they can promote. I also think general limits should be set to deter overly massive bid boosts. I use them for basic boosts to get awareness, but I think it should be used in moderation. I don't support boosting comments for money / reputation in order to avoid people noticing your over the top bid boosting. It seems sketchy.

9) What is your sentiment towards flagging how we can counteract flag abuse?

I think we need to have a downvote instead of a flag for when we simply don't like something so that people aren't harassed or overly flagged for something when they have no knowledge of the unset standards set by whoever is flagging them (who may have massive influence) the link to this is here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@scottcbusiness/the-downvote-proposal-a-solution-to-the-flag-crisis

10) What are your feelings towards the current initiatives set in place to deal with spam, security, etc (could they be improved or changed?)

I'm really happy with the latest effort to protect the community in terms of helping to regulate spam, plagarism, security, and abuse! I'm sure we can always do better, which I think is more so in terms of the other things previously discussed like regulating vote selling and bid bots and fixing flag abuse. I'd like to thank all the amazing projects running out there and shoutout to @guard @steemcleaners @freezepeach @cheetah @steemplus @patrice @spaminator @anyx

C) Community Questions

1) What do you think makes Steemit special and worth supporting?

I am very big on free speech and being able to spread out wealth distribution which is what Steem/Steemit does by allowing us to monetize our daily lives on social media. I am very passionate about seeing Steemit through to widespread adoption and supporting it moving forward to allow individuals to live with financial freedom or at least enable them more to be able to do so.

2) How much do you use Steemit on average per week?

I easily go on everyday and try to post as much as I can. I'd say a minimum of 1-2 hours a day if not closer to 3-4 haha.

3) What is your favourite type of post?

I love educational and helpful posts as well as value driven content, which is all I really look for when I'm on here.

4) Do you have a specific favourite post you would like to mention or link to? (Feel free to give a shout out to the author)

I don't have a favorite post haha sorry, but if you check out some of the stuff I've been curating you'll find tons of awesome authors content.

5) What kind of posts do you dislike?

Posts that don't provide value. I think sharing pictures of your life and fun personal things like that are great, but I feel like as a witness we are held to a higher level of responsibility in educating and helping support the community. Sharing our personal side is great, but we need to keep our vision aligned with supporting the people who put us in power to begin with.

6) How do you feel about the Steemit governance structure?

I think it's great, but there will always be ways to improve it which I will try to highlight, support, suggest, and work on in my own projects and contributions. Please feel free to share your thoughts! I think for a lot of major changes I'd like to poll the community for their sentiment and feedback before firmly dedicating to suggesting a major governance structural change or something similar.

7) How would you improve Steemit?

There is soooooooo many things I want to improve.

► Witness Communications Assembly (WCA) - In the making - https://discord.gg/ecStvEf
► Steemers - A non-profit curation bot I run that focuses on Steemit educational and value driven content and I have built a community around it - https://discord.gg/9FNXSpH

These are future projects, ideas, and endeavors I set out to accomplish, influence and support

► Evolving Steemers to a much bigger project with a curation trail and more
► Witness Verification - a sub project within WCA for verifying witnesses as real people
► Witness Interviews - I'd love to work with some other people to get a consistent interview schedule going with witnesses on a weekly basis.
► Weekly or bi-weekly poll or survey with pressing topics to discuss and or vote an opinion or sentiment towards it which will then be delivered on this discord (included in witness report)
► Onboarding brands, corporations etc. (Requires reporting and analytical tools and services)
► Correcting Steemit tag use - Tags should be used to inform, not for upvotes. So, I believe that we should follow suit with blogger, wordpress and medium and allow more tags used to allow for branded hashtags as well as informational, niche, and categorical tags for indexing.
► Originally I shared "The Downvote Proposal" as a point of my political views and personal values, but with enough support we could turn this into a full on movement. I think we need a downvote that doesn't affect reputation and or a way to fix flag abuse.
► Bot Limits - we need bot limits on how much you can upvote per bot. It makes sense to have like a 5 SBD limit to at least deter people from massive self promotional bids and make it more of a nuisance to do so.
(I'm not fully against or for bots, I understand how they are bad and I understand how they help minnows, but the profit and the distribution of the profit seems poorly representative of what Steemit tries to be.
► Removing inactive votes (I hear this is planned soon, but not sure so I'm including it)
► Minnow Representation - not sure what I will do here, but I plan to help more minnows find ways to get noticed and break the minnow ceiling earlier if their content is quality.

These are just some of the ideas I have currently on my future projects on my discord channel, but are not set in stone (even though this questionnaire will be).

D) Leadership Questions

1) As an "organization" gets larger there can be a tendency for the “institution” to dampen the inspiration. How will you avoid that issue with Steem?

I aim to improve communications, transparency, and improve the relations between witnesses and end users as I believe that it is extremely important and one of the main things that needs to be improved. Because I am motivated to improve these things I don't there will be any issue with losing the spark of creativity and inspiration in the work. I think that when we do achieve the things I'm striving to improve, we will have cultivated an environment that encourages inspiration and creativity.

2) What do you feel is the biggest challenge facing witnesses today?

I feel like one of the biggest issues facing witnesses today is everything that I have set out to improve, mainly communications and transparency.

3) What is one mistake you see witnesses making more frequently than others?

I'm fairly new to the politics, but the biggest mistake I've seen is missing blocks and then not communicating explanations and updates.

4) What are a few resources you would recommend to someone looking to gain insight into becoming a better witness?

Given I'm new to witnessing I don't have many witness resources. Here are a few guides I've gained value from while setting up my node originally:

• https://steemit.com/howto/@l0k1/howto-configuring-more-frequent-time-synchronisation-on-ubuntu
• https://steemit.com/witness-categor/@fbslo/witness-server-setup-tutorial--steem-in-a-box#@scottcbusiness/re-fbslo-witness-server-setup-tutorial--steem-in-a-box-20180506t213235414z
• https://steemit.com/witness-category/@drakos/tips-and-guidelines-for-the-noob-witness-setup
• https://steemit.com/steem/@someguy123/your-guide-to-setting-up-a-witness-server-steem-in-a-box-hf19
• https://steemit.com/witness-category/@bitcoinparadise/how-to-setup-a-low-cost-low-memory-basic-witness-seed-node

5) What advice would you give someone going into a witness position for the first time?

Again, I'm very new, but I'd say make sure you're trying to witness to make a difference as you probably will end up mostly paying out of pocket for the witness node (it's not about making profits).

6) What are you doing to ensure you continue to grow and develop as a witness?

I'm highly motivated and on Steemit daily. I want to continue contributing and ensuring that Steemit and Steem are headed in the right direction. I will ensure I continue to grow and focus on my duties by dedicating to witness updates/reports and the work I will be checking into ideally daily if I can manage it.

D) Personal Questions

1) How did you get into cryptocurrencies?

I started getting curious about late last year and have been following cryptocurrency and blockchain projects, especially social media token related projects and getting as involved as I can ever since.

2) What hobbies or interests do you have outside of Steemit and cryptocurrencies?

I make music and share it all on @scottychams, play the ukelele, longboard, play video games, meditate, and explore philosophy and metaphysics.

3) What is your favourite movie genre?

Mystery thriller / anything that is hard to predict and has an interpretative ending that could be taken in different ways and left up to the viewer to decide like Shutter Island, Inception, and many more that I can name off the top of my head.

4) What is your favourite movie or movies?

My favorite movies that I've seen many times are: Book Of Eli, Shutter Island, Goodfellas, The Hobbit, and any amazingly directed movie like Scorsese or Tarantino.

5) What is your favourite musical genre?

Urban music so hip hop, soul, R&B, neo-soul, etc. It usually has the most content, context, and if lyrically inclined, I've found the most conscious.

6) What are you favourite bands/albums?

Chance The Rapper, Towkio, Taylor Bennett, Logic, Mac Miller, Isaiah Rashaid, Alex Wiley, Vic Mensa, KembeX, Saba, Mick Jenkins, and a lot of Chicago based artists.

7) What is your favourite book (fiction or non-fiction) and do you have a favourite author?

I don't have a favorite book, I rarely read, I am too busy trying to be learning and doing things while multi-tasking in a multifaceted learning and working environment.

8) What is your favourite TV show?

I really enjoy Game Of Thrones, Westworld, Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Hell On Wheels, Community, The Office, Friends, Man Seeking Woman, and Lucifer.

9) Which is your favourite Star Wars movie from the original trilogy?

This is so specific haha, I'd say the 2nd movie in the original trilogy.

10) Margarine or butter?

Neither, I'm a savage.

11) The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?

Neither, sorry people. I rarely listen to other artists or have any opinions professionally as an artist myself who mostly ends up listening to my own music to critique it and improve it.

12) Have you ever tried Marmite?

Nope.

13) Are there any weird facts that you would like to share with everyone?

I can hear electrical transformers in everything and it's super annoying (most people don't have this issue).

14) Is there anything else that you would like other people to know about you?

Just that I really care about this community and the whole purpose of these questions and running for witness is all for you. Everything I do is to set an example or help contribute to the community. I really love the vision and values here and want to see it through to the end!

Credits for curating and creating the current set of questions: @thecryptofiend @jesta @geoffrey @scottcbusiness (myself) & @omitaylor

If you are looking to participate in my post giveaways that I do for every post. I am not going to be running those on witness posts as I don't want to over-saturate witness posts with random participation comments or and keep the signature a little more sleek.

✅ Join our @Steemersbot communities to network and grow together with our other Steemers - https://www.facebook.com/groups/Steemers/
Our pinned post has a bunch of resource for you to use and contribute to!
Also join our Discord channel - https://discord.gg/hNMjvBz 📣
We have lists of other servers, upvote bots, promo, discussion, contests, faucets, and everything you can think of!
W can also chat on Telegram - https://t.me/steemers 📩
We share our promotional posts here for now mostly

🙌 You can also follow me on:
Twitter - https://twitter.com/Scottcbusiness
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ScottCBusiness
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/scottcbusiness
LinkedIn - https://ca.linkedin.com/in//scottcbusiness
Steemit - https://steemit.com/@scottcbusiness
Discord - ScottCBusiness#5242
Minds - https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness

Delegation

📲 If you don’t always use your vote power or all your SP or just want to help me, you can delegate SP to me to support my efforts and help me reward my followers and those I found to provide quality content that is educational or valuable to Steemians. Use https://steembottracker.com/ to delegate any amount to me and or the bot!

Proxy And Running For Witness

Proxying your vote is pretty simple you just go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses navigate to the bottom and type in a username here:

I have started to take an active interest in Steem witnesses treating them as future global decentralized politics. If you don't want to learn or bother to stay up to date with it and do not want your vote wasted then you can make me your proxy to vote on your behalf! If you believe in me as a witness kindly vote for me by going to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and voting for me at the bottom by typing in my username ‘scottcbusiness’

Vote for @ScottCBusiness

Witness Communications Assembly