The Reports from the Witnesses aims to provide the community with a summary of what all the witnesses have been up to. Every week, I collect all of the reports from the individual witnesses and assemble them into a single aggregated report.

The details here are a summary (paraphrased by me), based on what I found in the individual reports. If you are interested in reading everything the witnesses have been up to - including many details that are left out of this summarized report, please click on the links to view their full reports.

Witnesses can continue posting their posts to the witness-category and/or witness-update tags, and I will assemble everything I find there. If I miss any reports, just let me know and I will correct it. If you have any issues with the summary that I wrote for your report, please let me know and I will do my best to address your concerns.

Historic Reports from the Witnesses can be found here:
https://steemit.com/created/reportsfromthewitnesses

So without further ado, I bring you the seventh edition of 'Reports from the Witnesses'!

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Reports from the Witnesses 2017-01-01

@abit - Witness Position #4

• No change to SBD pegging policy. Current parameters: APR 5%, price feed bias -0.1%.
• As of writing, market price of SBD is about 1.001 USD per SBD.
• Neutral so far on the proposal for witnesses to reduce APR on the 1st day of every month, and no change on other dates.
• Changes to witness voting.
• Summary of curation.
• Read the Full Report (12/30/2016)

@smooth.witness - Witness Position #10

• Summary and explanation of the proposed change to witness policy to only update SBD interest on the 1st of the month.
• Plan to reduce APR from the current 6% to 4%, and price feed discount from 3% to 2%, both on January 1.
• Explanation of current price feed discount.
• Has sold ~15000 SBD from stability fund in order to reduce the SBD price when it drifted above 1 USD. During periods when SBD experiences fluctuations below 1 USD, plans to support the price by purchasing more SBD for the fund.
• Internal market maker bot has continued to provide continuous service with less than 1/2% price spread. It has now completed approximately 20000 trades. Plans to continue increasing the available trade size, although slowly for now.
• Worked with several other witnesses, most notably @abit, @bhuz, and @aizensou in testing and identifying performance problems with the new ChainBase implementation of the Steem node software, particularly on low-memory and low-I/O-speed systems. The group was able to find good workarounds and have recommended these to witnesses and node operators experiencing problems (see @abit's post for more details).
• Read the Full Report (12/31/2016)

@clayop - Witness Position #12

• Powering down 26 MVESTS to cover server maintenance costs. Expects this will cover 4~6 month of server costs.
• SBD pegging bot reduced fund into half.
• Rethinking burning SBD now. Has been asked by some people about how to utilize SBD with their service, but they commonly pointed out that scarcity of SBD is problematic.
• Will reduce SBD interest rate to 2%, which is over 167% higher than the base rate of USD (0.75%). Intention is decreasing burden generation from the interest, while providing some incentives that can cover USD inflation rate.
• Happy new year!
• Read the Full Report (12/30/2016)

@gtg - Witness Position #17

• Price feed discount set to 2% below observed market price.
• Minimum account creation fee set to 35 STEEM which is currently worth ~ $6. Still trying to keep it in a range $5 - $10.
• SBD interest rate at 3%.
• Current observed SBD value: $1.035.
• Current observed STEEM value: $0.167.
• Current observed current_sbd_supply: 1198006.299 SBD.
• Current observed sbd_interest_rate: 600.
• Current observed account_creation_fee: 30.000 STEEM.
• From now will try to only change sbd_interest_rate at most once per 3.5 days by at most 0.5% per update. May not be able to follow that policy with economic conditions we might encounter in the future though.
• Info on how to download recent blockchain data.
• Can contact directly on steemit.chat, as Gandalf.
• Read the Full Report (12/31/2016)

@joseph - Witness Position #22

• Decided to move main witness node to a new dedicated server with a little more resources and speed.
• Provided detailed instructions for witness node setup / configuration under the new HF 16 conditions.
• Account creation fee: 35.00 Steem (steemit promises $5 worth of Steem upon signup).
• Price Feed Bias: -1% (SBD price slightly above $1).
• SBD interest Rate: 5% (To encourage conversion to Steem).
• Read the Full Report (12/26/2016)

@klye - Witness Position #25

• Final witness update for the year 2016.
• In progress of moving to a new apartment.
• Development on projects has been crawling forward but progress is happening.
• STEEM.GLOBAL faucet should be up again soon.
• High ambitions and good feelings for the upcoming year.
• Read the Full Report (12/31/2016)

@good-karma - Witness Position #26

• Last witness post for 2016.
• Actively working on new changes for eSteem.
• Working with growing team of eSteem.
• Around 48 people have joined the translation team.
• Have around 20+ eSteem languages being translated/ready with help of community.
• eSteem mobile application release with exciting changes and language addition is scheduled from the beginning of January, 2017.
• eSteem desktop initial release is scheduled for 5th January, 2017.
• Posted on latest eSteem feature list.
• SteemAdvent calendar project officially concluded. Hopes to continue this next year.
• After hardfork, node is still running stable and smooth. Block production is 100% for almost 3+ month now.
• From Jan 1, 2017, APR will be lowered to 4% as we have seen strong support for SBD for few weeks now. Other parameters are ok.
• Will reevaluate all witness votes tomorrow 1st January, 2017.
• 2016 was a great year. Expects 2017 will be even greater. Will continue to deliver number of projects that will help platform to grow.
• Read the Full Report (12/31/2016)

@bacchist - Witness Position #42

• Prior to HF16, had not missed any blocks. Post HF16, had started to miss blocks.
• Upgraded server to prevent missed blocks. Since server upgrade, no missed blocks.
• Has had a trying few weeks, between work responsibilities, the holidays, and a devastating Santa Flu.
• Trying to get a group together to play a fantasy game called the NFL Playoff Challenge.
• Read the Full Report (12/30/2016)

@dragosroua - Witness Position #50

• Last week was rather slow on Steeimt, with the majority of people looking forward to Christmas and to a very well deserved hiatus from social activities.
• There was a discussion in chat about flagging and votes.
• Thanks to @abit, @clayop and @someguy123, there is now a possibility to use shared memory for keeping the chainbase database file, which drastically speeds up the witness node while lowering the risk for missing a block.
• Updated witness node to use the updated changes.
• Updated SBD APR to 7% from 9%.
• Keeping the account registration fee at $5.
• Witness node running smoothly with no major incidents.
• Looking forward to the Steemit roadmap, which was announced a couple of weeks ago.
• Although the Steem price kept going down, is increasingly optimistic about the future of the platform.
• Read the Full Report (12/26/2016)

@timcliff - Witness Position #52

• Submissions for the "Welcome to Steemit" page banner have been posted for the community to review.
• Created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series.
• Summary of @the.masses project.
• Posted a summary of Steemit's latest release, which included a fix for the NSFW issue.
• Reminder to only use 4 tags (instead of 5) when creating posts, due to a glitch in the blockchain code. Steemit is also working on a fix to change the limit to 4 when you create a post via Steemit.com.
• Proposed a knowingly unpopular idea to change the Steemit economy by starting to charge a 3% premium to power up.
• Published an announcement based on @ned's comment in the steemit.chat witness channel, that the Steemit roadmap would be delayed.
• Submitted first pull request to the Steemit.com GitHub repository! The PR makes a bunch of updates to the "Welcome to Steemit" content, based on suggestions from @sneak, @pfunk, and @timcliff, along with several others from the community.
• Continue to be involved with a lot of the GitHub discussions about feature additions and glitch reports.
• Will be reviewing the images for the "Welcome to Steemit" page banner with Steemit. This will take some time though. Expect an update within the next few months.
• Plan to start working on more changes to the Steemit.com front-end website via GitHub pull requests.
• Summary of witness funds.
• Price discount reduced from 5% to 2%.
• Registration fee reduced to 40 STEEM, which is approximately $6.40 worth of SP (at the current market price).
• SBD interest Rate reduced from 7% down to 4%.
• Will try to follow policy of updating SBD interest only on the 1st of the month.
• Read the Full Report (01/01/2017)

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Some Notes:

• Many witnesses do not report every week, and prefer to only report when they have updates.
• I recommend that you include communication as one of your criteria for evaluating witnesses, but keep in mind - it is not the only criteria. There are some witnesses that prefer to work "behind the scenes", and do not do much as far as reports.
• For witnesses that are not currently posting any reports, I would encourage you to provide the community with at least some insight into what you are currently working on :)

Remember to vote for witnesses:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you aren't sure who to vote for, check out this Witness Voting Guide!