A team of egoless programmers can organize itself as a participatory democracy in which all members have equal status. For this democratic organization to work, team members must

• recognize and respect the strengths and weaknesses of all team members, including themselves,
• volunteer for the tasks they can perform as well as anyone in the group,
• be willing to perform any task that needs doing, even when they think someone else might do a better job,
• recognizing that assigning every task to the person who might do it best would probably result in an unfair distribution of effort.