Consensus

allows a group to reach an acceptable and supportable resolution to an issue, even if that acceptance and support is uneven (see Treloar, 2013 on the importance of differentiating between uneven consensus and unanimous agreement).

We follow the consensus based decision-making process, as described by Hartnett (2011), that involves identifying key concerns through open discussion, creating proposals that address them, then amending the proposal until everyone agrees to move forward. This can take a few minutes or a few weeks.

The aim of consensus is to redistribute power and advocacy. Tenured faculty do not have more say than undergraduate students, though we acknowledge that faculty still have greater power of persuasion and that unconscious biases are always at work. We support one another during the conversation by stepping up to advocate for another person’s work or ideas if they are quiet, modest, or absent, and stepping back if we have spoken more than others. We aim to ask questions as much as we make statements. The result is that these conversations tend to be fun, interesting, and supportive.

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# See also

Deprivation of alternatives as an equivalent for consensus (z#4021)

Consensus is evolutionary.

A smart contract is a set of commitments that are defined in digital form, including the agreement on how contract participants shall fulfill these commitments.

I share interests with Ward and enjoy collaborating with him in everything to do with Wiki. My special focus is capabilities-based computing, for a robust privacy and confidentiality composition, that moves us toward consensus in online social, sustainability and decentralised systems. For brevity we call this modern computing or sometimes simply Wiki.

This repository contains a proof-of-concept implementation for our distributed smart contracts system. Contracts are written in SES, a secure subset of JavaScript. SES programs are deployed in vats, a runtime that operates consistently across single "solo" machines, permissioned/quorum clusters, or public blockchains. This proof-of-concept demonstrates the "solo" and "quorum" vats executing in independent machines and processes, communicating securely using ocap protocols.