Quorum
The minimum number of members who must take part before a result counts at all.
A method is only real when its numbers are written down beside it — what share passes, how many must take part, who may object and on what grounds. Ask a community which method it used for its last three decisions. If the answer is the same for all three, either the community is very small or the method is aspirational.
A quorum is the floor on participation: how many members must take part before a result means anything. It is a different question from what share has to agree, and confusing the two is common enough to be worth stating plainly. A motion can clear a two-thirds bar with six people voting and still be worthless, because six people are not the community.
Both directions hurt
Set it high and a single quiet month stops everything. Holidays, illness, a busy harvest — participation falls, nothing reaches quorum, and a group that carefully protected itself against a small faction deciding for everyone finds it cannot decide anything at all. This failure is far more common than the one it guards against, and it is corrosive, because the fix people reach for is to start deciding things outside the process.
Set it low and five people decide for forty. Usually not maliciously. Usually just the same five, because they are the ones who read everything and always have.
Neither number is right in the abstract. What makes it tractable is refusing to pick one number for everything: a low floor for the reversible operational business, a high one for anything that changes the community’s agreements. That is the same logic as decision tiers , applied to participation instead of to method.
What counts as taking part
The definition matters as much as the number. Communities differ on whether an abstention counts toward quorum — usually it should, since the member did engage — and on whether silence counts at all. A group that treats non-response as participation has a quorum that can never fail, which is the same as not having one.
Reading it from the outside
Ask a community what its quorum is, and then ask when it was last missed. A group that has never missed one either has excellent participation or has set the number where it cannot bite. Both are worth knowing, and only one of them is usually true.
Sources & further reading
- 1 VoteCast — glossary — quorum as a per-decision setting, with the trade-off named
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
A pass threshold above half, usually two-thirds, used where a bare majority is too thin a basis.
A proposal written precisely enough to be decided — stating what changes, who decides, and by when.
Sorting decisions by what they cost to get wrong, and giving each class its own method and timeline.