Today in the United States many of us are performing our duty as citizens to elect our next round of leaders. Voters will go to the polls and establish our vote for who will be sent to office to create the laws that run our nation. You may not know it but Steem has a similar election process for the people that operate our digital society. Instead of electing someone to Congress we instead vote for who will be our witnesses.

There are currently 146 accounts actively running the software to be a Steem Witness. These people have the responsibility of maintaining our blockchain to ensure it stays operational and that all blocks are created as they should be. Additionally they are the ones to decide how the Steem blockchain will function and what software laws will be enacted to manage our social interactions here. Fortunately you have a voice in this election!

Each Steemian has the ability to vote for 30 different accounts to be considered as a witness for our chain. The easiest way to vote is to head over to https://steemit.com/~witnesses to cast your ballot. The top of the vote grabbers will become our core witness group who will act on our behalf to maintain our great digital society. I find it to be a much easier process than American elections and searching for your place to go cast your vote.

That being said it can still be a bit complicated. How do you determine who you should cast your vote in favor of? Do you vote for your favorite content producer in hope they lead properly? Do you support the team behind your favorite dapp since they have the technical know-how to create something wonderful? Those are great starts but what if they have a totally different vision for where the Steem chain is heading than you do? How do you even find where a candidate stands?

Introducing @witnesssurvey

@witnesssurvey intends to become a tool for the wider Steem community to begin conversations with our elected witnesses. We will be posting quarterly surveys that will be generated from questions asked by anyone with a Steem account to be answered by any witness that chooses to participate.

How it works

@witnesssurvey will begin by publishing a post to seek questions from the wider community. Once it goes live anyone with a question of the witnesses can leave a comment on that post. After 14 days all of the questions that were presented will be lumped into a single survey that will be generated as a new post from the @witnesssurvey account. This post will be sent to each active witness via a Steem memo transfer and updated to reflect the block that the memo was sent in.

Witnesses will then have 14 days to copy the survey into their own post (or comment on the survey post) to answer the questions that were asked of them. We hope that witnesses will be able to answer all of the questions presented but considering that many witnesses are running full time businesses on the chain we want to be respectful of their time. To accommodate this we will ask each witness to complete a minimum of the top 25 questions gathered by the community that are determined by vote value on question comments. Again all of the remaining questions will still be included on the survey and available for witnesses to answer at their discretion but due to their time limits they may not be considered. Since this survey is voluntary it is up to each witness to determine what they prefer to answer.

Finally 14 days after witnesses are presented with the survey we will make a new post that will link to each answer provided by a witness. We hope that the community will take this new source of information to heart and be better suited to make decisions on who they will be supporting with their witness votes.

Timeline

11/6/2018 - Announcement of project
11/6/2018 - First call for questions begin
11/20/2018 - Deadline for submitting questions
11/27/2018 - Survey will be distributed to all active witnesses
12/11/2018 - Deadline for witness responses to be included in first survey results
12/18/2018 - First survey results published to Steem chain

WitnessSurvey.com

All data that is submitted will also be maintained at witnesssurvey.com. This centralized site will be an easy place to locate past witness answers and to give users answers to where witnesses stood at the time of our surveys. It is intended to act as an easy reference point for where to locate data on each witness even if they choose to not participate in this project.

Thank you

I want to thank each person that is involved in our wonderful community. It is each of us that holds Steem together and makes this place the home it is. I also want to thank each person that actively participates in this project regardless if you're a witness responding to the call of the community, a Steemian with a question you need answered or even someone just wanting to learn more about the governance model that Steem provides. It will be all of us that will make this place succeed by working together.

Update:

You can begin submitting questions for the first Witness Survey by heading here now.