Witnesses secure the Steem Blockchain. It's an important role and each and every account holder gets 30 Witness Votes. These votes elect the Witnesses that get trusted with the job.

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https://steemitimages.com/800x0/https://i.imgur.com/jJctFKt.jpg
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I began a short series yesterday [Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses](https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-1), over the next few days I will perform analysis on the digital footprint of the witnesses to get to know them a bit better and help inform my witness vote. I welcome discussion during this series and I hope it raises awareness of who we are electing to manage the Steem Blockchain.
 
***There may be different philosophical reasons in the community for choosing witnesses and this analysis (and my choices) are not intended to judge right or wrong but I wish to inform the community what the different witnesses have written about, what they stand for and how active they are in the community.***

Furthermore this discussion is not intended to be technical in nature but will instead look at some Graphics and Stats to help us get to know our witnesses, especially the top 20.

https://steemitimages.com/DQmehTDgLpQghT7ZWRnfYZAgK4VkGKZXgQUH476xivXaiZf/circles.png
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## Top 20
The top 20 witnesses play a special role for the Steem Blockchain. 
As witnesses get voted (with witness votes) from other members of the community they get a rank based on the combined SP of the accounts that voted for them. The top 20 witnesses by rank get to verify transactions and create new blocks on the Steem blockchain. 
*One backup witness (outside the top 20) is also chosen but the the top 20 get to participate in each round of block production*

### Communication
We talked yesterday about how witnesses have a special role in Steem. They are the gatekeepers. They run the software that defines how the Steem Blockchain operates, the software that defines the rules of the Blockchain. When you hear of hardforks, this means there has been a change to the rules and the witnesses have updated the code they are running to create the Blockchain. 

To the extent that Witnesses are elected to represent the people (other Steemians) there needs to be some level of communication between Witnesses and the community. Not all Witnesses need to be active communicators, but as discussed yesterday, a mix of talents in the pool of Witnesses may benefit the community. 

**What does witness communication and engagement with the community look like for the top 20 witnesses?**

### Posts (Ex Comments)
Witnesses communicate with each other on private chats, debate topics of interest and proposed changes. It's not possible to analyse all of this activity but we can look at the number of posts and comments that Witnesses have made on Steemit. This gives an indication of their engagement with the wider community. 


 https://i.imgur.com/haObmVL.png
* The size represents the length of the posts by the witnesses
* The colour represents the mean date of the posts; dark blue is older, light blue is newer. 
*We can see @netuoso is light blue which means his posts are newer. He joined the platform in mid 2017, most of the other authors joined in early to mid 2016 and some have not posted much recently which means they get a darker colour.*

### Comments
The picture for Comments looks a little different.
https://i.imgur.com/5kqGw0s.png
* The size represents the length of the comments by the witnesses
* The colour represents the mean date of the comments; dark blue is older, light blue is newer. 

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## Quality of Engagement
Quantity does not equate to quality however, in the witnesses case they generally do put a lot of effort and thought into their interactions here on Steemit. 

The following graphs classify each comment and post of the top 20 witnesses into short medium and long posts/comments. 

## Number of Posts (ex comments)
https://i.imgur.com/t5XUXIS.png

## Number of Comments
https://i.imgur.com/XOmBYHf.png


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***Thanks for reading, join me again tomorrow as I continue my analysis...*** 

## Previous posts in this series:

* [Steem - Get to Know the Witnesses (Part 1)](https://steemd.com/stats/@eroche/steem-get-to-know-the-witnesses-part-1)



https://steemitimages.com/DQmehTDgLpQghT7ZWRnfYZAgK4VkGKZXgQUH476xivXaiZf/circles.png


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**Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.**

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