Anyways if you make it a communal affair everybody is going to like participating in it. People are inherently team players to the extent that we die or go mad alone.

I was in a team that was terribly overworked and there was shitloads of stuff needed to be done, which nobody did - since it wasn't anyone's job.

Here's what we did - everybody got a slice of work nobody wanted to do. A chore if you will. The system used to assign chores was simple - the guy complaining about some shit not being done, got to be the chief of this "department". He would set the standard, keep track of what is going on, report to the rest of the team and enforce the rules that we agreed upon collectively. We also collectively created a penalty system.

This the made certain that the shit that needed to be done, got done. The shit that didn't need to get done, didn't get done. Everybody got to participate in organization and got some hands on experience with how sausages get done, this is pretty important in engineering environments since a lot of people haven't really been in charge of anything in their lives.