Kelty argues that free software practitioners form a “recursive public” — a form of social organization distinctive for its capacity to argue about and modify the technical infrastructure through which it communicates and coordinates. This recursivity — the ability of a community to reconstitute its own ground — is what makes the free software movement culturally and politically significant beyond its technical outputs.
OM’s work cites Kelty as the theorist who named and analyzed the practice of open protocolization from within the free software movement, providing the genealogical thread through which the naming conventions of the protocol underground research connect back to hacker and FOSS culture. Kelty’s recursive public is structurally analogous to what OM calls an extitution: an organizational form that remains in service of the underlying protocol and is constituted by its willingness to reconstitute itself rather than defend its own institutional persistence.