When I got back from Bletchley Park yesterday, I immediately started huffduffing more stories about cryptography and code-breaking.
One of the stories I found was an episode of Ockham’s Razor featuring Professor Mark Dodgson. He talks about the organisational structure at Bletchley Park:
The important point was the organization emphasised team-working and open knowledge sharing where it was needed, and demarcation and specialisation where it was most appropriate.
This reminds of another extraordinary place, also displaying remarkable levels of collaboration, that has an unusual lack of traditional hierarchies and structure: CERN.
Bletchley Park produced the computer. CERN produced the web.