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Quorum

Some decisions need more than a single agent's opinion. The quorum strategy empanels a set of scrutineer personas, has them deliberate over the material, and produces a single defensible verdict — useful for reviews, approvals, and assessments where the reasoning matters as much as the answer.

When to use quorum​

Reach for a quorum ecosystem when you want:

  • Multiple perspectives — several personas assess the same input through different lenses (e.g. conduct, privacy, regulatory, cyber).
  • A defensible outcome — a recorded verdict with the deliberation behind it, not just a yes/no.
  • Panel-style review — architecture review boards, risk boards, governance conformity checks.

For a straight pipeline (research → synthesize → report), use the standard orchestrated strategy instead — see Agents & orchestration.

Shape of a quorum ecosystem​

A quorum ecosystem uses strategy: quorum and a quorum block with three phases:

strategy: quorum

quorum:
  empanelment:
    persona_source: /catalog/scrutineer/     # where the personas come from
    select:
      min: 3
      max: 6
      must_include: []                        # force specific personas
  deliberation:
    # how the panel discusses and reconciles
  verdict:
    # how the final decision is formed

1. Empanelment​

The panel is assembled from a persona source — commonly the scrutineer domain in the catalog. select controls how many personas sit on the panel (min/max) and lets you force specific ones with must_include. Each persona carries its own perspective / lens.

2. Deliberation​

The empanelled personas review the input and deliberate. Because personas are grounded in catalog knowledge (see Catalog), their positions cite curated sources rather than free-associating.

3. Verdict​

The deliberation is reconciled into a scaled verdict — the run's outcome on the ecosystem's declared scale — which the report agent presents to the operator. Dissent is preserved, not averaged away: where panellists disagree, the minority position is carried through to the verdict rather than smoothed over.

Scrutineers​

The scrutineer domain supplies the personas a quorum draws on. Its catalog content (e.g. scrutineers.json, scrutineers-architecture.json) defines the lenses and roles a panel can be assembled from. Adding or refining scrutineers is a catalog authoring task.

Relationship to quality gates​

Quorum is a deliberation model, complementary to the standard quality gates. You can still enable report: true (to assemble the verdict into a report) and grounding checks. The challenger agent plays a similar "stress the conclusion" role in orchestrated ecosystems that the deliberation phase plays here.