So. What do people really want from their witnesses (vote here)? To produce blocks? Cool, cool. What about...

• Contributing to the community
• Providing open communication
• Making rational decisions
• Making a difference

These are qualities that give top witnesses a deserving vote, imo.

So what about @stem.witness?

Contributing to the Community

Well, hopefully, readers have heard of @steemstem by now - one of the most trusted and enduring teams on the entire STEEM blockchain. If not, we started out as a simple, humble curation initiative designed to improve the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) tags on steemit.com.

But we grew to become so, so much more. Initially a two-man team of @lemouth and @justtryme90, we now host a group of, I dunno, certainly over 40 individuals serving as management, curators, honor members, mentors, benefactors and so on, with a span across 6 languages (with more to come).

We are expanding into directions I... am not sure how much I am free to divulge yet but some of them of which I'm personally the brainchild of are ridiculously exciting, like, globally revolutionary and entirely reasonably feasible. Other directions just make total intuitive sense as we grow to fill more niches that seriously need filling.

While this is all going on, we still curate 6 languages on STEEM via a rigorous system of quality control unbeaten on the blockchain (and pretty much most mainstream media).

If that wasn't enough, we've already had two crazy cool meetups, one at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and the other just recently at the Virgo Interferometer in Italy, with other meetups in our regional communities such as Stemng, in Nigeria.

Of course, I cannot forget to remind people that we have our very own Dapp in development - but readily usable - at steemstem.io, where only quality STEM content curated by us will be promoted (with all other STEM content available too). A store will also be developed along with many other soon-to-arrive secrets!

So in the deepest sense, @stem.witness totally covers point 1.

Providing Open Communication

SteemSTEM is a huge believer of openness and we do whatever we can - on top of being on the very public blockchain - to maximize on this. So, we have our community Discord Server, in which you can be pointed towards all our quality guidelines and expectations, freely mentored by expert writers and more.

On top of that, every curation action we take is fed through a discord bot on a publicly visible channel where you can see - and scrutinize - the posts which were voted, when they were voted, with what strength of VP and by which voting trails.

After that, posts are given a comment picture with information on what just happened to them, where to get more information and so on.

We also provide regular posts promoting our best weekly content alongside interviews of our many curators, general updates, and importantly, much-desired statistics.

Want to know where our money's going? Simply follow @steemstem.pay to see our reward distribution, of which 65% of all rewards goes to benefactors with anywhere between 0 and 5% going to us management (a juicy total of about 2 STEEM if I'm lucky!)

Making Rational Decisions

Now, this one is more subjective than it might seem, but thankfully the SteemSTEM reputation precedes itself, with not a single scandalous activity in 2 years of running on the blockchain - 2 years in which barely a day has been seen without us functioning in one way or another.

Throughout this time, we never took for granted that it was the STEEM Blockchain that made what we do possible. We have barely made a cent between us for the work we've done. This is because we believe in fairness, openness and the project itself. Almost everything we earth through curation rewards and other sources goes back into the system or to our generous benefactors.

So are we responsible? I'd say hell yeah, we are, because we love what we do and we love the STEEM blockchain. It's stressful and hard and depressing sometimes, but with so many roads to explore, we'd be foolish not to push on every day that bit further.

One of those roads was our shiny new witness, as just another way to give something back to the blockchain that gave us so much. You can see the details of our witness in our recent announcement post:

The SteemSTEM witness (stem.witness) is being run on a Hetzner server hosted in Germany with the following specifications:

Intel® Xeon® E3-1275 v5 Quad-Core
64 GB DDR4 ECC RAM
2X 512 GB NVMe Gen3 SSD
1 Gb/s Bandwidth

We are a community built on science, technology, engineering, and maths. We hold in our hands facts, evidence, culture, wisdom, and experience.

Making a Difference

This last one I'm not yet at liberty to divulge too much information on yet - intellectual theft and all - but making a difference is built into the very concept of SteemSTEM. With communities spread around the world from Venezuela to Nigeria, China and West & Eastern Europe, we are at an advantageous position. Combine this with our half-dozen international collaborations for upcoming projects, some of which are guaranteed to bring a large, sustainable userbase to STEEM (big promise, I know), and you can start to see a silhouette of our many fingers in many pies, and how that may indeed Make a Difference - but:

We Need More Support!

If the above case is not a recipe for a mighty fine witness, I've no idea what is! So if you want to see a difference as claimed by a longstanding, highly reputable team on STEEM, drop a vote our way =)

Alright well, that's about the best advertising I can conjure up today, so once more, if anyone reading has a single slot they can shuffle around, slam it down on stem.witness. We ain't going nowhere. Heck, we literally have STEEM fuelling the SteemSTEM rocket!