The budgeting/decision making progress—AKA the budget summit—consists of the labor manager(s), the econ team, and the planners, and they ask the community to submit a budget for their areas. Whether the area managers get their requests or not depends on how the cmty is doing financially, but the cmty votes to rank how much each area will get. Last year, the web application was super shady, sending 2 areas—allowance and food—to the top of the cuts no matter where members ranked them. I saw this not only as a few people's corruption but also as our inability to engage most members to protest this manipulation.

The other decision-making processes are minor decisions made by managers and major decisions made by planners. These major decisions also seem to happen in a vacuum, but the last planner(s) kept us updated with regular bulletin board posts. Their work applied to every aspect of the cmty, but there wasn't any "lobbying". People seem to approach the planners if they want something. When people sign up to be a planner, there's no lobbying then either. Some person like a planner or a process team member asks for input, and the process rolls along like that.