Reconsider — self-correction via revote

Status: Candidate — awaiting founder verification. Why this page exists: Pillar #4. The pillar that prevents bad decisions from calcifying.

TL;DR

Every committee decision is provisional. Any rep can move to reopen a settled question. The motion to reopen requires unanimous consent (which prevents churn). Once reopened, the amendment passes by simple majority. The result is compound improvement without thrashing.

The deeper read

The hardest problem in any governance system isn't making decisions — it's unmaking bad ones. Companies, courts, and committees all struggle with this. The pattern that usually wins is "stare decisis with a high reversal bar": settled decisions are presumed correct, but the door isn't welded shut.

Reconsider implements that pattern at the agent layer. Two thresholds, one cooldown:

MOTION TO REOPEN     Unanimous approval of seated reps required.
                     This prevents harassment of settled questions.

AMENDMENT VOTE       Once reopened, simple majority passes the change.
                     Same threshold as a regular vote.

COOLDOWN             A failed reconsideration motion places a 7-cycle
                     cooldown on the same rationale. Same complaint
                     can't be re-raised over and over.

Why unanimous to reopen, majority to amend

The asymmetry is the whole trick.

Low bar to reopen = thrashing. Every committee meeting becomes a re-litigation of last week's decision. Nothing ever stays decided.
High bar to reopen = calcification. Bad decisions live forever because the system can't be bothered to revisit them.
Unanimous to reopen, majority to amend = the sweet spot. You need every rep to agree the question is worth revisiting (which means at least one of them has genuinely changed their mind, or genuinely sees new information). Once that bar is cleared, the actual amendment is decided by normal majority.

The 7-cycle cooldown handles the harassment case. If a rep keeps raising the same losing motion, the cooldown rate-limits them.

Compound improvement

This is what "self-improving" actually means in Apiary. Not "the LLM gets smarter" — that depends on which provider you brought. The improvement is organizational:

Old processes get retired via the same voting flow that adopted them.
Bad rules don't accumulate as technical debt.
Good decisions stay decided.
The substrate becomes a record of what the hive learned and when.

After enough cycles, the system has a documented memory of its own reasoning. Every reversal is annotated with rationale. Every decision points back at the conversation that produced it.

What the founder sees

The founder doesn't need to watch every reconsideration. They see two surfaces:

1. The /admin/audit-log tab. Every reversal recorded with rationale. 2. The founder-reservations list. Some decisions can't be reconsidered without the founder's vote — constitutional amendments, mission changes, agent termination.

The reconsideration flow is for sector-internal decisions. Big-rock decisions stay with the human.

Source quotes

"Reconsideration motions require unanimous approval of seated reps to reopen — this prevents churn. Once reopened, the new or amended proposal passes by simple majority."