This is a cool idea, and I know dust votes have been in the news lately. The big problem really is for comments, and not really posts as normally the latter will surpass the cumulative total of $0.03.
I had prepared a post about this topic and other things, and was going to post it in the next day or two. Its about someone who follows me, namely @appyguy who was commenting about his problem he has with 'dust votes'.
I will append my article and mention this within. Its a great idea, and thanks for the community help. Lets make everyone aware of this so it is a success!
For anyone having issues with steemit.com now, use https://steemitstage.com. Its just the same, but everyone looks like this: 
Thank you very much for appreciating the problem @slobberchops! I am thankful that you are going to bring it up in your upcoming post! I too think it is an issue that will be helpful for newbies and minnows so the more people that learn about it the better! :)
Happy to hear you will share this initiative. More importantly, it is great you will spread the concept of "dust" with the community. I think this is still a new topic which many people are not aware of, and as a newcomer, it wouldn't be something you would get in contact with. It is also not very logical, up until the payout day there is a $0.02 value next to your post, but then suddenly this disappears when the 7 days payout period is up.
Just wondering how the automation works. I have noticed some posts of mine that have an upcoming payout of $0.00 are passing by and others are getting the dust vote which propels them to author payout status.
Does it ignore $0.00 votes and only append to $0.01 and $0.02 ones?
I noticed a $0.00 passed by a few minutes ago and didn't get a vote.
There's some more below that will either be appended or not in the next 9 hours. I'll watch them and let you know what happens. Apologies for the small text.
You have to have at least 1 vote and not a self-vote, and a value less than $0.025. That is basically all.
As we are figuring out how much SP we need it could be that it is skipping some posts/comments as there is not enough VP. But Dustsweeper always loops through the users starting with the last one that received a vote.
Currently, you have received 20 votes and saved an amount of $0.283, that otherwise would have turned into dust.
We hope to make these stats available to all, probably via Discord.
Thanks for the response @danielsaori. Assuming the $0.283 for 20 votes is an SBD value, I have to question if this is in fact worth doing?
If 20 votes are worth $0.283, then a single vote is technically valued at $0.01415 ($0.283 / 20). If I get 71 votes for 1SBD then the worth of it is $1.00465. ($0.01415 x 71).
It's only nominally better than not bothering. This is not critiscim, just the facts that Im seeing in front on me.
The $0.283 value is only the original upvote value, the amount you would have lost. You also have to take the upvote from the bot, which you paid for into account. The value of the bot vote itself will basically give you 0 in return, so you can see the $0.283 as your profit/savings.
Hope that makes it more clear.