I was thinking about Kelty as an anthropologist and the group of people that he was studying. There are so many discoveries when studying a group of people and there is a lot to learn about culture. Kelty stepped into a whole new culture that was not being explored widely by anyone and in doing this he found completely different subject matter to study. I think that this is interesting because some people enter into things with one objective and through processes find a new objective. I don’t know if that really makes sense but I think there can be a common goal even with changing subjects matters.

Mt.Zion is a perfect example of this because everyone in the class has a common goal but different groups are approaching the goal in different ways. There is the gardening project, tutoring project, and drum line project, etc. These projects are all bringing people together to make the community a better place, and to better the lives of the people who are involved. The class has collectively pulled together to accomplish these different tasks for a common goal, however in doing this there is experience and new interests that may have been discovered. Just like in Kelty’s Two Bits, he discovered a new world of “recursive public” that is a new concept and he fell in love with the idea.

The whole geek culture thrives on a consistent structure of codes and script that ultimately leads into a bliss of computer programming that open doors to create new paths of learning and development. As long as the geeks are creating the paths, the future of open source and recursive public can be limitless. I relate Kelty’s concept to the Mt.Zion concept, because if you can open doors and help create paths for people, they develop so many opportunities to become more than they are. Mt.Zion is a place where these paths are created all the time, and though they are not as simple as internet and computer programming paths, they are still paths of development that are improving a community.

Just like the internet community, real communities need people of development as well and this is where the technical writing in our class can play an important role. If we look at the grant writing in same ways as the geeks’ code writing, we can get an insight on how these grants advance the community by opening development opportunities. Creating new paths for people of all ages to travel down and continue sharing knowledge that is plentiful and not regulated but rather experienced and openly given. Maybe Kelty’s “recursive public” concept can be applied to many different aspects of life and not just the internet, I don’t know but it seems that there is a relation that we can make with the grant writing of our class. Its all about opening doors and finding new ways to develop something into more.

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