Hey @itstime, thanks for this functional challenge: always a good thing to know who you're voting for an why. The witnesses, especially the top 20, are our politicians, sort of, so it's actually rather important if you care about the future of steemit. A lot of my choices are the result of being part of @helpie and trusting the veterans there :-) But also, after 4 months of being active here I've had the pleasure of meeting some of them in Discord :-)

In general the question is "does this witness have the best for steemit in mind and are they actively engaged with the communities that make up the steemit eco-system?" What "the best" is exactly, is where it can become difficult to make a good or well-thought out choice when you're relatively new to the platform, as the economy can become rather complex if you think about all facets that make up the economy, like the users, the bots, the fake accounts, curation, reward pool, SBD vs STEEM vs SP, bandwidth and voting-power... It can become too much rather quickly for starters. And I'm still a starter:-)

So in my choice I weigh the latter part more, because engagement is something I can actually experience through my own interactions and the interactions from others I interact with. And that's where @helpie comes into the picture: through them I've come to learn a lot about the platform and some of the witnesses. Without @meno inviting me there I don't think I would have voted at all at this stage...

So here's my top 5 in no particular order (I vote for 30, but that would make too long a post):

• @curie because they are the best curation group I know of on Steemit; everything gets curated manually, which is hard work, and they curate quality posts that are underrated and preferably target beginners on the platform. I owe them a lot personally and regularly see other deserving contributers being nicely surprised, rewarded and encouraged by being "curied" :-)
• @followbtcnews because @followbtcnews = @crimsonclad. Need I say more? ;-) @crimsonclad will be visiting Steemfest, now if that's not a sure sign of dedication to interacting, I don't know what is ;-)
• @aggroed because of his long term relationship with @meno, @helpie, PAL and the Minnow support group. Also his Steem Monsters could well prove to be a ginormous boost to the platform if it manages to lure in "outsiders". In any case, @aggroed cannot be omitted in this shortlist.
• @ausbitbank because I owe @ausbitbank so much, and that's because he backs several curation communities I get regularly upvoted by. Most remarkable is #informationwar, that manually curates posts from steemians that try to write about the truth behind political nonsense and media lies; this is one of the most active groups / communities I've seen and I'm ashamed to have to admit I haven't even visited their Discord yet...
• @yabapmatt because he is the other mind behind Steem Monsters and the creator of Steembot Tracker.

But you know what? There are so much good people active on Steemit that it's almost impossible to choose between them; that's why my voting list is full already. For me, as someone who himself can't be active every day besides producing one post per day, it eventually comes down to what you read and what you hear on Discord from the people you trust, so here are some others:

@c0ff33a
@therealwolf
@themarkymark
@pfunk
@utopian-io
@ocd-witness

And when / if @helpie decides to start as witness, I'll just have to make room for that one ;-)