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I hope that I can get our old host to reply, as she had the hardest time getting to know and accepting the rest of us, and her insight would be valuable. But, I’ll take a stab at this…
While there are only 10ish of us active these days, there used to be more. I myself am the result of two fusions. We had an interesting time starting out, because our system was (and to some extent still is), made up of three subsystems. Communication and awareness within a subsystem was a lot easier than communication to another subsystem. While there were walls between parts within a subsystem, there was a grand canyon between subsystems. Two of the three subsystems already had some level of awareness of their subsystem mates when we were officially diagnosed.
Starting out, the best method we had for communication was the written word (or the drawn picture for those not old enough to write). Do you have any idea how hard it is to co-ordinate a decision making process with umpteen parts, some of who only front once in a great while, when its based solely on everyone writing everyone else? It was VERY slow going. A single decision could take months to sort out. It wasn’t helped by our host refusing to believe we were multiple, and destroying any such written works she found.
Our subsystems were also separate for a reason, and trying to deal with all people in all subsystems was truly overwhelming for most of us. So, we decided that each subsystem would elect a representative for a one year term. Those three parts would work together to basically control our lives for the year. For every day decisions, just 2 out of 3 had to agree to something. For major decisions, 3 out of 3. Those representatives worked on communication (largely written) between the 3 of themselves. Each council member also was responsible for acting as a communication hub for their own subsystem. (If part A in subsystem 1 needed to talk part N in subsystem 2, they each went to their respective council members, who would then communicate with each other.)
We are run by a representative democracy to this day. Every fall we elect a new council, and the council elects a chairperson. After 28 years, we have a lot better communication with each other, and don’t rely on relaying messages through the council so much. The subsystems are also not nearly as separated. We still fall back to the written word, though. That’s the primary reason we each have our own email address, so we can write one another.
That’s really a bit of an oversimplification, as the situation was more complex (not everyone bought into the council idea at first) but that’s how we worked it out. I currently hold the council seat for the third subsystem. There is usually a lot of wheeling and dealing between system members when its time to vote. “I’ll vote for you if you do this for me…”