Consensus building has become an everyday activity in environmental planning and management, and its use is often held to be a symbol of a fair, transparent and fully participative process. However, this paper argues that in any real situation practical constraints and tensions between different goals lead almost inevitably to compromises in the ideals of inclusivity and non-coercion. This gap ...

This paper presents the abstraction of open consensus and argues for its use as an effective component for building reliable agreement protocols in practical asynchronous systems where processes and links can crash and recover. The specification of open consensus has a decoupled, on-demand and re-entrant flavour that make its use very efficient, especially in terms of forced logs, which are kno...