There's a news story in the reconstruction of Iraq, says a journalist, who compares it to the "unbuilding" of the WTC after the attacks. Both are managed by improvisatory, ingenious, on-site leadership - the opposite of bureaucracy.
. . . the defacto organization that sprung up from nowhere, and without anyone's actual approval, to run and lead the cleanup efforts is fascinating. The "on the fly" ingenuity that many of the engineers, construction workers and other onsite personnel display is in a word...inspiring.A little-known example of "a pack not a herd" is the spontaneous uprising of German gentile women with Jewish husbands in Berlin, 1943. They got their husbands back too. This story has been somewhat suppressed because it rightfully implies the rest of the German population could have done more to stop Hitler than it did. (I like to think that those women learned about standing up to tyranny from their exposure to the Jewish tradition, or perhaps their attraction to Jewish men was part of a rebellious questioning attitude they already had.)
Michael Everson, a typographer in Dublin, has taken it upon himself to develop Unicode for all the world's alphabets so that they can all be represented on computer screens. He got the calligraphy bug by reading Tolkein as a child, and is now the world's leading expert in the computer encoding of scripts. Michael's informal group of coders is certainly a pack, not a herd.
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