This is a port of node-gossip (also on github) to python.

We will make some changes, but it will probably stay true to the architecture:

http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ArchitectureGossip

What txgossip provides is a cluster communication mechanism. Participants in the cluster get notification about joining and failing peers. Each peer also provides a key-value store of data that the other peers can access. Using this data store functionality like leader election can be implemented.