Depending on how much control you have over the configuration, and how much "failover" you are willing to sustain, looking into the "peer-to-peer" mechanisms employed by git or even bittorrent (as far as there actually is documentation) might be educative.

The alternative is to have either a designated master and a tree hierarchy (and a single point of failure), possibly together with an "election scheme" to elect a new master if the current master goes offline. This is unfortunately also not trivial (see "irc netsplit" and bugs in the NT Domain Controller), but maybe you can provide enough configuration information (like IP addresses) where the master is determined by configuration. For example if you can assume that there is no malicious participant, the current master can yield to any master with a lower IP address (or whatever criteria).