This may relate to Ward's interest in plasticity and FedWiki.
Latitude for Deviance by Ward.
HORIZONS Visual horizon. Cognitive horizon. How far ...? Awareness horizon. Know of Know about Know how Cooperative horizon. Collaborative horizon. Coordinative horizon. Co-identifying horizon.
Web 
Michael Levin.
I definitely look forward to talking with Ward about the intersection of Alexander's "nondestructive transformation" and the Janus Heuristic. This seems related to Levin's work with mechanisms of morphogenesis and surely gets extended to human cooperation to adapt at scale to change. The interesting question is what can the present and future FedWiki provide to enhance the morphological capability of groups of people.
Is the FedWiki akin to AgCl in that it can control the ion channels. It can influence the pattern influencers. Meta meta. If so how? How not?
Aren't "target morphologies" something like Patterns of Commoning and the neighborhood pattern work that William Schindel (Pattern Based Systems Engineering) and I undertook a few years ago?
"solved the mystery of how groups of cells cooperate to construct specific multicellular bodies" sound very much like the Viable System Model to me.
Isn't cellular plasticity equivalent to individual choice?
What are neighborhood "computations?" Are computations decisions? How do computation relate to decisions. Models are necessary for computation. Computations are for decision making. Computation interpretation within contexts. What does a neighborhood compute? Neighborhood Computation Types: filtering, summation, subtraction, elimination, stratification, amplification, division, multiplication, Role of Time (duration and History) in computation and decision making. Role of Space, distance, area on computation. Role of Purpose on computation? Role of Politics on computation? Role of Models on computation? Role of Processes (mechanics) on computation.
Levin's Papers: Target Morphology
"take the journey computer science has already taken, from focusing on the hardware—the proteins and biochemical pathways that carry out cellular operations—to the physiological software that enables networks of cells to acquire, store, and act on information about organ and indeed whole-body geometry. "
I hope that Ward will fork this and tell us about this.
''...these bodies will grow and remodel until a correct anatomy is complete, and then they stop.''
How do neighborhoods manage stopping? Not only stopping but dying or "dissipating" so the next generation can emerge with being weighed down by dysfunctional organizations.
STOPPING is as important as STARTING, maybe more important! Episode Pattern--Ward.
So neighborhoods would need a model of the desired state and the Generative/Regenerative Capabilities and actors would need to be able to act toward that model. This seems very akin to Russell Ackoff's Idealized Design (which adapts to new visions of new futures).
# See also - Agile Learning - Plasticity - Mutable Plastic - Computational Plasticity - Wiki as Knowledge Graph