I have been a BitShares witness for the past 2 years, and have developed the bts_tools (http://bts-tools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ and https://github.com/wackou/bts_tools), a suite of python tools to help build, run and monitor witnesses on a graphene chain. It already supports BTS2 and Muse, and I plan to port it to Steem too. This of course means that I'm interested in running for a Steem witness when the DPOS phase kicks in  I started mining steem this weekend and read up a bit on it, looks intriguing!