What Remains Open

The most significant open question about the scaling transition concerns the pace at which it should be attempted. This chapter has argued that scaling before the first community has genuinely tested the architecture is a primary failure mode. But it has not specified how long the first community phase should last, because that specification depends on empirical questions — about what the first community learns, how quickly the architecture reveals its genuine qualities, what external pressures make further delay costly — that cannot be answered in advance of the first community's experience.

A second open question concerns the appropriate relationship between Providence's central constitutional layer and the specific governance decisions of local communities. The principle of subsidiarity — that decisions should be made at the most local level at which they can be made well — is constitutionally embedded in Providence's architecture. But the specification of what kinds of decisions can be made locally and what kinds require coordination at a broader scale is a governance question that will be answered differently in different contexts and will evolve as the network of communities grows. This volume provides a framework for that specification. The specification itself will have to emerge from practice.