This is an excellent step & this will make eventually leads to the "Escape Velocity" needed to reach the moon. While the Witness process aka Consortium creation in many blockchains are either in experimental stage or controlled by companies, we definitely have a mechanism where the token holders can at-least have a say whether he is an exchange or a new user.
right now is the pressing need for all Witnesses to actively develop and communicate reasonable code acceptance standards that will enable us to hold one another accountable.
Few of us @reggaemuffin, @yuriks2000 @yehey & others are working on a model & we have a living document here : https://hackmd.io/s/ByT1BuG5m Witnesses and communities can collaborate and share their ideas. That will help everyone to reach conclusions quicker than someone, say steemit inc trying to find all the information and put a logical order to it.
From my end, it will take a bit more time to reach even a draft format as I feel its essential to have a clear problem statement and collect information from all the stake holders.
For the sake of transparency, my personal intention is also to submit a paper at the following IEEE https://www.comsnets.org/blockchain_workshop.html regarding
Real world experiences from deployments of blockchain
Innovative use cases which leverage blockchain
This will not only give the effort a formal approach but we (STEEM) will be noticed in the academic world as a very different blockchain ie decentralized.