Hello Steemit 👋 😁 🖖 It's been a great journey here so far for the 
I'm using a different account for it - 
Why do it?
As a coder and tinker-er, I've always been drawn to doing projects for the sake of themselves, for the simple enjoyment of doing them. I began my investigation into becoming a witness in the same light.
The witness community are like all great online communities - somewhat friendly, somewhat frosty, often terse but helpful, short of calling Doctor Google for you 😉 With their help I looked into it, played around with some server set ups, both at home and on cloud computing services.
I want to contribute for the sake of doing it. I'm interested in the rewards too, but as 
Who are you?
I'm first and foremost a person. I haven't revealed much about myself personally and won't. I believe in privacy and protecting the option of anonymity. These are important (I won't say they're rights though) and important to preserve.
In a way I stand as an example of someone who can be real and yet anonymous. I built my reputation from scratch here, without referencing anything else I may have done online, publications, credentials, even just tweets that make me look cool.
So you know who I am without knowing irrelevant details of my life, that's how I see it. Everything relevant is on the blockchain.
My contribution
Here's what I do around here:
FOSSbot Voter
https://github.com/Steem-FOSSbot/steem-fossbot-voter
The big one is the only quality, versatile and I believe the best free, open source Voter bot for Steemit. This is in active development, I've just released v0.2.8 and hope to release v0.2.9 very soon.
The spirit of the project is that it is open and takes into account good practice on Steemit. Bots are always going to be contentious, but as long as the possibility for them exists, I want to help to provide an option that is actually good, that does not just necessarily result in vote following, whale hunting, etc.
You can read more about the project on the GitHub project page or one of the posts e.g. this one. And there's a docker deployment too (announcement.
Steem FOSSbot organization
https://github.com/steem-fossbot
This is admittedly mostly just me, but there are various projects and ideas up there. I've had some contributions to date (especially from 
Apart from Voter bot, the only other project in a working state is What Tags (announcement, a simple web app for Steem to show what tags a user uses, and the tags their followers use.
My development of interesting stuff for Steemit will continue through this too. It's just to damn inspiring to not do it!
White paper update project
I can announce that 
It occurred to me about three months ago that this would be cool, and I made a post calling for it. One of the great things about this will be showing what the actual difference are to the mission of the project, as well as the implementation details, in human readable format, using git diffs.
I made the first steps on my own, of copying the PDF to LaTeX format, trying as much as possible to preserve formatting. While I was ignored for a while, we're now in business.
The idea going forward is that we can now begin updating the whitepaper, eventually arriving at a current, up to date version which actually reflects the latest system. This will be really useful for us I think and well worth doing.
I'll make a post about this again, but I imagine the best way to go about it is to make changes sequentially, tracing from hard fork 1 all the way to the latest HF 19.
Seed node
A seed node is now available at seed.steemnode.world. I will keep a fairly up to date mirror of block_log.xz (compressed) available via http. You can check the stats on the server on port 19999.
I'm new at this, but I hope to have this running reliably.
I'm using a BuyVM (frantech) dedicated KVM server, which as 1 Core 3.5+ Ghz CPU (dedicated), 4 Gb RAM, 80 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth.
Social responsibility
I engage with the issues facing Steemit. It's actually one of the things that has kept me interested, the debates, conflicts and changes happening to Steemit. It's really interesting and I love to engage people in debate on the hot topics.
I try to explain some basic uncontroversial aspects of the system to noobs and people who don't know about the technical side, to the limit of my knowledge at least, which admittedly is limited. But I do help in this regard when I can.
I put forward my ideas on the more controversial, or side-vs-side type questions, often with reference to the whitepaper. I don't claim to know the answers, but I do want to have a place in the debate.
I think this is an important aspect of being a witness, and the witnesses which I regard the highest do this.
Finally, as a new witness
The main thing here. I'm very excited to join the team on this one and hope you vote for me. It is my feeling now that we need more witnesses as Steemit is expected to grow.
As with the seed, I'm running a BuyVM (frantech) dedicated KVM server, which as 1 Core 3.5+ Ghz CPU (dedicated), 4 Gb RAM, 80 GB SSD, unmetered bandwidth. My witness is on v0.19.0, and I have yet to catch my first block.
At present I'm just running a witness node on this server but if I get up in the witness ranks I'll be looking at running a full node, perhaps in collaboration with someone else.
Witnesses have some technical responsibilities, setting the variables of the blockchain by consensus. My settings for the relevant variables are set using 
They are:
- Account creation fee: 0.3 STEEM - seems a little high but for now I will leave it
- SDB interest rate: 0% - the consensus is in on this one currently
- SBD exchange rate: 2.173 SBD / quote 1 SBD - more or less average
I endeavour to keep the witness running to the best of my ability. I do not run a back up witness at this time but if I climb the ranks I certainly will.
As a new witness I have a lot to learn, and I endevor to do so. You have my word, as long as I am a witness I will do everything I can to improve what I can provide.
Enjoy myself!
Yes, I enjoy it! Steemit is really revolutionary and I'm really happy to be involved in it, for my part, though small.
If you want to vote for me, go to https://steemit.com/~witnesses and vote for personzzz with three Z's
🤓 👍
Edit
Netdata now running correctly on both seed node and witness.
Also I just noticed I broke 300 followers and gained reputation 64! A good day 😆