Quorum
Attested multi-agent consensus with a shared blackboard — an MCP server.
An orchestrator opens a proposal, participating agents write context to a
shared blackboard and vote with reasoning, Quorum applies a principled
aggregation algorithm from the social choice literature, and every step —
proposal, writes, votes, outcome — is attested via
Stamp and traced to Telinea.
The record is immutable, tamper-evident, and independently verifiable.
Hosted endpoint (no sign-in, public):
https://quorum-mcp.terradev.cloud/mcp
Why
Majority vote among LLM agents fails on disputed questions because agents
trained on overlapping data share systematic blind spots — they are not
the independent voters the Condorcet Jury Theorem requires. And when
agents do decide together, the decision process — who voted, what they
said, what context they worked from — is invisible.
Quorum is the complete primitive: algorithm plus state plus provenance.
Tools
-
register — one-time account setup: bind your api_key (a Quorum
key you choose) to your telinea_key. The Telinea key is stored
encrypted under a key derived from your Quorum key (AES-256-GCM,
HKDF) — the Quorum key itself is never stored. Every span for your
proposals is then pushed with your Telinea key, standard OTLP bearer
auth.
-
propose — open a proposal: name (becomes the proposal id),
question, voters (expected identities), deadline_minutes.
Optional: api_key (from register — binds the proposal to your
Telinea account for span streaming; omit for anonymous use),
namespace (tenant prefix — the id becomes ns:name, so different
teams can reuse names without colliding), options (default
["yes","no"]), algorithm (default approval), quorum (min %
of voters, default 100), threshold (supermajority share, default
66.67), description. Returns the proposal id, creation attestation
id, deadline, and blackboard URI.
-
write — append key/value to the proposal's blackboard, with
optional author. Writes are appended, never replaced — the full
ordered history is preserved and attested.
-
read — read the blackboard: every write in order with timestamp,
author, and attestation id. Optional key filter. The deliberation
record before voting.
-
vote — submit a ballot from an expected voter identity, with
optional reasoning (stored in the attested record, never affects the
outcome). Ballot shape depends on the algorithm — see below. Duplicate
votes and post-deadline votes are rejected with structured errors.
-
resolve — apply the algorithm and attest the outcome. Callable
once quorum is met (or after the deadline); also fires automatically
when the deadline passes with quorum. Idempotent. Condorcet cycles and
missed supermajority thresholds return co_winners with status
unresolved — genuine ambiguity is surfaced, never hidden.
-
history — the complete attested record: creation, every write,
every vote with reasoning, the outcome. Optional filter:
all | writes | votes | outcome. The compliance artifact.
Algorithms
The blackboard
LLM consensus failures are often information failures, not algorithm
failures — agents vote in isolation. The blackboard is shared working
memory scoped to one proposal: agents write analysis, read each other's
findings, then vote informed. Write-first, read-second ordering and
immutable pre-deadline votes are the conformity-bias defenses.
Tracing
Every proposal is one Telinea trace. The root span (proposal) opens at
propose and closes at resolve or deadline expiry — its duration is
the deliberation time. Each write, vote, and the resolution is a child
span emitted in real time with its Stamp attestation id. Root status:
OK decided, UNRESOLVED ambiguous, ERROR expired without quorum.
Span ids are deterministic (uuid5 over proposal id + event seq), so
replays and restarts stay idempotent. Push is fire-and-forget and
fail-safe — telemetry can never break a vote.
Auth is per-account: spans are pushed with the Telinea key registered
via register, so ingest attributes them to the correct account. The
key is stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM under HKDF of your Quorum key —
never stored); a proposal-scoped re-encryption under the server-held
QUORUM_DATA_KEY lets spans authenticate after restarts without
re-presenting the Quorum key. A database dump exposes only ciphertext.
Config: TELINEA_INGEST_URL (default
https://ingest.terradev.cloud/v1/traces), TELINEA_WORKSPACE_ID,
TELINEA_PROJECT_ID, TELINEA_DISABLED=1, QUORUM_DATA_KEY,
QUORUM_ACCOUNTS (account store path, default
~/.quorum/accounts.json).
HTTP transport
Concurrency capped at 100 simultaneous POST /mcp via asyncio.Semaphore.
Rate limiting is per-proposal: write and vote are capped at
QUORUM_PROPOSAL_RATE events/min per proposal id (default 120), so one
hot proposal can't starve the rest. The edge per-IP zone in Caddy is a
coarse backstop only.
Attestation is queued and coalesced: concurrent events share one
NTP sample per drain batch instead of one query per event — each event
still gets its own Stamp record (unique id, own payload hash), so
throughput isn't bound by NTP round-trips.
State
Event-sourced: one append-only JSONL file per proposal under
~/.quorum/proposals (override QUORUM_DATA_DIR). Namespaced
proposals live in per-namespace subdirectories
(proposals/<ns>/<name>.jsonl). The log is the history — history
is a filtered read of the same file the tools append to. Nothing is
rewritten or deleted.
Self-hosting
Caddy handles TLS once DNS points at the host. See deploy/Caddyfile.
License
Copyright 2026 theoddden. Licensed under the
Apache License, Version 2.0.
