  The majority of the literature on consensus assumes that protocols are
jointly started at all nodes of the distributed system. We show how to remove
this problematic assumption in semi-synchronous systems, where messages delays
and relative drifts of local clocks may vary arbitrarily within known bounds.
Our framework is self-stabilizing and efficient both in terms of communication
and time; more concretely, compared to a synchronous start in a synchronous
model of a non-self-stabilizing protocol, we achieve a constant-factor increase
in the time and communicated bits to complete an instance, plus an additive
communication overhead of O(n log n) broadcasted bits per time unit and node.
The latter can be further reduced, at an additive increase in time complexity.
