What is a witness

A witness is someone who runs a server with a witness node that holds and verifies all transactions. They are also community leaders who run projects to grow and improve Steemit.

Introduction

Hi, I’m Josh Tristram, a young Steemian from New Zealand. I am here to share my goals and projects as a witness.
Here are just a few of my goals/projects:

• Growing Steemit in New Zealand
• Growing the design community
• Help crack down on spam bots
  Unlike some other witnesses, I have set myself doable goals that I hope to achieve in the near future.

My Setup

My witness node is running:

Server	Specs
OS	Ubuntu
RAM	13GB*
Cores	2*

*I will be upgrading to 16GB of RAM and 4 Cores in the next few months and will upgrade my server as my rank grows, and with the growth of Steemit.

New Zealand

I am a young guy from beautiful New Zealand. I invite all Steemians to come and hang out with me here in New Zealand. You will enjoy it!

(Image from )

Here is an amazing photo I took of a beach in New Zealand.

Passion for Steemit

Ever since I joined Steemit, I’ve just loved it. I like how nice everyone is and I have made lots of friends and met amazing people. I want more people to experience what I have.

Projects

As a witness, I will be running a few projects to help grow Steemit.

Grow Steemit in New Zealand

New Zealand is a small country of only four million residents (about the same as one US city). I hope to get 500+ Kiwis on Steemit in the next twelve months. Here's how I will do it:

• Flyers (A bit like @timcliff’s 10,000 Flyers Marketing Campaign but in New Zealand.)
• Set up a New Zealand Steemit account to help new users grow
• Spread the word over social media

With all this, I hope to get lots of Kiwis here on Steemit.

Grow the design community

I personally love design and really like how many designers are here on Steemit, but I think we could do better.
Think of a place like behance.net, but where you get paid for keeping your portfolio up to date. Wow, that would be nice... and we can do it. By reaching out to designers on mediums that they already use to converse, we can point them to Steemit and grow our amazing design community.

Crack down on bots and spam

Before you get mad, I mean spammy bots that really add nothing to our community. Vote bots, welcome bots, and other well-made bots are projects that I support and hope they continue.
I am talking about bots that send tons of people tiny amounts of money and ask for upvotes, and bots that comment on everything and say "nice post, please upvote me." These are the type of bots that I want to work to remove.
I also want to help crack down on spammers who just add meaningless bullshit to the comments.

How would I go about this?

I would crack down on this by setting up more projects like @steemcleaners--ones made for removing bots using our words. And if that doesn't work, downvote the shit out of them.
If we build up an account made for this, we could really crack down on them and help fight this problem.

How will I do these projects?

I hope to run these projects in my own time, but will not be able to do it alone. I will use some of the money I get from being a witness and also run fundraisers to get the money required to follow through with these projects.
If you are at all curious, please send me a message on Discord and Steemit.chat

Goals

• Weekly witness updates
• Update my witness post as goals and projects change

I see Steem going up!

I'm not sure what you think, but I see Steem going up. As word spreads about a social network that you get paid for, investors will rush to Steem and start buying. I am personally investing a lot of my time into Steemit to build up my Steem Power as I don't want to miss the next big Bitcoin.

Vote

If you like any of the projects or want to help me grow here on Steemit, please vote for me as witness. If you have any questions, please feel free to message me without hesitation.

If you want to help build Steemit together, vote for me at:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Or if you like command lines you can use CLI_Wallet: vote_for_witness youraccount joshtristram true true