When a proposal is submitted to the consortium, the members of the consortium must vote before the proposal passes. All members of the consortium must be notified of the proposal for it to be a valid proposal. Invalid proposal can still be discussed on, but cannot be approved officially. Each member picks one of the four possible options:
y: means "Yes", agrees to the proposal and wants to see it taken into effectw: means "Whatever", does not have an opinion about the proposal and does not want their voice to be counted?: means "Question", when the member needs clarification about the proposal before voting on it!: means "Alternative suggestion", when the member has a counter-proposal to the current proposal
As soon as there is any ! vote, the current proposal is put on hold, and the counter-proposal in the ! vote should be listened to, and voted on like any other proposal. All proposals have the same voting process, so that it's possible to have a chain of !, and along this chain, the original proposal is refined until everyone is satisfied. Or, a discussion takes place until there is no resolution (none of the proposals along the chain pass), indicating an impasse. If there are multiple ! votes for the same decision, the first ! counter-proposal should be listened to and the other counter-proposals are disregarded, but can be resubmitted as ! on the subsequent proposal.
Votes of type ? don't cancel the current proposal, they just ask for clarification from the member who proposed it. After the clarification is given, all members vote again for the same proposal.
The proposal passes if and only if all members have voted within the deadline AND there are at least one y vote, zero ? votes, zero ! votes, and any number of w votes. Deadlines are explained below.
The default deadline for all proposals is 21 days (exactly 21 * 24 hours), after that, members that have not given a vote are considered to have given the w vote. In this way, no proposal would have absentees.