What's the basis to vote witnesses?

With the recent acquisition of our supreme leaders, Steemit, came quite the relaxing of qualifications for Steem witnesses. At least for quite a few people. All the same, I still couldn't bring myself to vote for certain Steem witnesses, as I didn't think they should be witnesses at all, no matter what other stake holders might believe.

In the same avenue, there were certain witnesses that I have voted for that for some reason have yet to make it into the top 20 in the new Steem ecosystem post Sun-tastrophe.

It's made me come to wonder what exactly are the qualifications for a witness.

I suppose they should be qualified enough to run a server, or at least have someone run one for them.

I would say they should also probably be able to review code and decide whether or not it should be implemented on the chain.

That last qualification of mine was part of why it was so confusing when it took longer than I expected for GTG to get re-approved for top 20. I'm pretty sure he's a programmer, and therefor more qualified than many for witness.

That's now remedied tho, and he's in 8th spot as I write this.

He's also a pretty nice guy as far as I know.

Of course, there are other qualifiers for witnesses, like doing things for the sake of the chain.

This one is a bit of a debater for me, as it may bring in people or groups that I might ponder as to whether or not they should be top 20 witnesses.

Like curie for example. Great project. Bring more value to the chain than most. But who among them is making the witness decisions? Will they make the right decision?

We've seen a few times in the past where witnesses may have made questionable choices. It's important to know who's actually making those decisions.

There's also the matter of being an actual person and passing the Turing test. Though I may be inclined to argue that a sufficiently advanced AI may in fact make a better witness than a human.

I almost think that perhaps a few of our organizations on here should determine a list of questions to ask witnesses, to better inform those who are to vote for them.

Would they be in favor of reducing the power down? To 3 days? 3 weeks? The current 3 months is rather long.

Would they be in favor of removing the ninja mine from the chain? Prior to the recent incident I might be far more hesitant to be in favor of that. Fair or not, they own that stake, and to remove it would be a rather drastic action. Now however, I really don't know.

We've seen various incidents where it has been proven that code needs to be properly reviewed. Should all witnesses be capable of doing that, or hire someone who can?

Honestly, I don't know what the requirements of a witness should be.

But during these times of, honestly, war, I wonder if they should even be relaxed, or if that might result in further problems.

Was it actually the witnesses choice before Sun's actions that caused the tyrant to strike?

Should that cause us to favor witnesses willing to take drastic action against him?

I honestly don't know.

Leave your comments below. What do you think the basis of voting for witnesses should be?

_{Douce Apocalypse - Bodleian
Ascension of the witnesses (source)
circa 1265 -70
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.}