Being at psy festivals has taught me a lot about the organizing of individuals into an efficient and powerful group, and how that can be achieved quite effortlessly by mere structure. Bringing order to disorder by (en)trusting self-organization to everyone involved.
The buzzword I did not know back then is "decentralization" but the more I think about it the more it dawns on me that this structure of society is ideal for human beings, provided a certain level of awareness exists in enough individuals present to become an avalanche of positive, self-reinforcing behavior.
At a good psy festival there are certain conditions present that make it work for everyone.
An absence of prohibition in favor of encouragement to act responsibly
I claim that people generally dislike following orders, adhering to laws and respecting bans that are in their way. It degrades us somehow when we feel we have to follow someone else's orders, especially if that someone is not present with us face to face in order to give a good argument for it.
Instead of "no littering" signs it would be much better to put up trash bins and make sure they are emptied regularly to allow for the swarm to make use of them. With an aware enough crowd the problem will thus solve itself and noone will feel dictated to while trash gets properly disposed of.
The main encouragement for "right" conduct though comes from other people.
As social creatures we look to others to get our bearings about what is appropriate and what isn't. Going back to the trash example one of the most effective things I have found for keeping the floor clean and litter-free is to... guess what... pick up trash!
Not to clean the whole thing by yourself but rather to regularly pick a bit of trash if it's in your way and kinda signaling you to go pick it up. When others see this - especially first-timers to the festival - a certain "aha" effect takes place, making it utterly common to pick up trash you didn't yourself produce... until that behavioral pattern becomes the norm, a non-mandatory suggestion in this environment, something most of us are certainly not used to from living in regular society - picking up random trash off the streets.
I have seen this behavior and cascading effect over a week at Ozora, where I couldn't help but feel that my readiness to pick up a piece of trash that caught my eye somehow helped the swarm transform by eventually doing the same. Maybe I got inspired by seeing someone else do it. The point is that with enough willingness and unconditionality of a few the swarm's behavior can be transformed without any need for shouting, bans or regimentation from the top down.
Allowing people to live as they choose
One of the magic aspects about psy festivals is the utter sense of freedom present, because all of us have more than a week of time on our hands, the sound is always blasting 24-7 and thus people can ease into an organic flow of life that is quite absent in "regular" society where we frantically live by the clock, where everything is timed and condensed into tiny units of preoccupation, all day long, all week long.
But at a festival this "unstructured life" translates into people starting to follow their own rhythm completely. Some of them you may only see on day 1 at the main gate because they just love to go dancing at 4 in the morning and so they do. Sleep during the day, getting up at midnight - you won't see them all week unless that is your rhythm as well. Others can only be seen by the day. It's quite funny to keep running into the same people on the same rhythm as yourself, as opposed to seeing people at the end of the festival whom you have not seen once the entire time.
What this means is that people have a propensity to go do their own thing in their own way.
Like grains of sand in a river people who can flow freely will spread out quite organically. Some will want to take part in workshops in the morning while others always sleep in after a long night of dancing. And thus there is never the sense of overcrowdedness in any given situation because it spreads out so well, because people organize themselves by the sheer preferences they have. And then band together into temporary subgroups quite automatically.
There are clusters, yes, more people awake during the day than at night. But overall, this way of choosing our own rhythm and preference among a swarm is what makes the swarm work well. Due to the choice of your preference and your resonance you tend to run into people with the same preference, people who could be called a "sub-tribe" of the larger tribe. For example "afternoon" people, who can always be found at the mainfloor around the same time because they just dig the afternoon sound.
It wouldn't work for afternoonies to feel they had to dance at night, so they simply don't.
On the same token, some people never really go to the mainfloor to dance, instead they hang out on the nearby meadow all day on a blanket just being present and enjoying themselves, talking to people who are sitting down to rest for a bit.
Others are strolling over the camping grounds visiting other people's camps. Most of my time at a festival I just meet people and it's such a blast to decide in every second where to go and what to do, following my own intuition and let life guide me.
And so everyone is always at the perfect place at the perfect time. There is a very strong sense of it in the air.
And because of this you will find a rich social field of people and little things happening everywhere precisely due to the lack of mandated structure and the simultaneous endless possibility of occupying oneself with whatever part of the festival experience that is coming up for any single individual at a given time. Trusting that aware beings will find their way instead of mandating one for everyone.
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