Many hands make lice work. I arrived at this mutated quotation for two reasons. The not unusual experience of observing a troop of monkeys engaged in communal grooming and a belief that aphorisms should be something more than mere recitations of obvious truths. I've come to realize aphorisms reflect the obvious because it is seldom apparent to many of us. The original version of this old saw, while it lacks the ingenuity of my twisted creation, is never the less more useful to those of us who pay attention to the obvious.
Many hands do make light work.
This was never truer than it was during the Y2K project. The biggest secrets had to do with the coming together of organizations who were the fiercest of competitors and yet they realized that to solve Y2K properly they would have to cooperate, if only to coordinate how they would exchange data in the coming years. The net result was that while a lot of good work was taking place behind the scenes, these groups did not exactly seek out publicity. Some of these concerns were put to the side when the US passed a bill which made these types of intergroup discussions 'legal' and even incited the creation of other collaborative efforts. Over the years, I've wanted to write about these behind the scenes efforts, but it was not my place to do so.