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.