I would like submit an application on behalf of @curie. Please consider the following post as the main application and the answer for the first part.

https://steemit.com/curie/@curie/curie-or-who-we-are

Curie remains committed to serve Steem and is mainly focused on quality curation, rewarding authors, empowering curators, helping to build communities, and operating a community witness. As Curie being not for profit organization in its core, its operations have had a positive impact on Steem platform overall.

Unfortunately, Curie will not be able to proxy its vote and/or vote for BuildTeam witnesses. However, individual members have complete freedom to use their votes as they please. I personally have been voting for BuildTeam witnesses. I hope the following Curie manifesto from the whitepaper can answer that better:

Curie believes in absolute meritocracy with no compromises or scope for bias and corruption. To this end:

1. Curie is a community project operated and owned entirely by the community. 100% of all revenues and holdings will be distributed back to Curie contributors.
2. Curie will remain apolitical and unbiased.
3. Curie will never vote for its own posts.
4. Curie will never solicit anything from any contributor or beneficiary. (E.g. Curie will never ask authors to buy votes, Curie will never ask curators to pay for submissions, Curie will never ask reviewers to follow its trail, etc. All given votes and all curation will be purely on merit.)
5. All Curie contributors follow the same rules, no one is beyond reproach.