"Key to the City: Writing Code to Induce Social Change" by Jurnell Cockhren

### Overview In this talk presented at Strange Loop, civic hacker and infrastructure engineer Jurnell Cockhren explores how technologists can address social inequality through civic hacking, mathematical modeling, and collaborative open-source practices. Cockhren frames societal inequality not merely as a non-technical problem, but as a system bug characterized by divergent user experiences—where a system "works on my machine" for one group while remaining fundamentally broken for another, with little to no effort to reconcile the difference. Cockhren argues that by treating the government and societal systems as upgradable, citizens can contribute technical and non-technical efforts to patch these systemic bugs.

### Key Topics - **Civic Hacking and Upgrading Systems**: Viewing government and societal structures as upgradable systems where civic engagement acts as a patch to fix bugs and protect citizens. - **Inequality as a Hard Decision Problem**: Defining inequality as a decision problem blocked by decision-makers' emotions, unconscious bias, and an overwhelming lack of direction. - **Computational Complexity (NP Framework)**: Formulating the hypothesis that instances of inequality fall within the set of NP problems, where proposed solutions can be verified deterministically in reasonable time by oppressed populations using modern technology. - **Mathematical Modeling**: Mapping the Geographic Coordinate System to the complex plane via the Riemann sphere to define closed municipal boundaries and model localized instances of inequality. - **Open Source Collaboration Model**: Drawing parallels to open-source software development, where distributed individuals contribute at varying levels of effort (writing core code, building charts, documenting, or reporting bugs) to achieve cumulative social change.

### Technical Details Cockhren introduces a formal approach to model social disparities: - **Decision Verification**: Framing the objective around verifying whether a disparity has been minimized (a "yes" answer verified in reasonable time, drawing on NP complexity concepts). - **Coordinate Mapping**: Using the Riemann sphere to map geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) to the complex plane. This mapping ensures density, meaning that between any two geographic locations on Earth, a complex number exists. - **Closed Paths and Boundary Definition**: Utilizing closed paths on the complex plane to represent geographic and municipal boundaries (such as Davidson County/Nashville). Within any given closed boundary, distinct sets of inequality instances exist (e.g., income disparity, police treatment, digital access). - **Axiom of Choice**: Invoking the axiom of choice to select instances of inequality from bounded sets in any order via a choosing function, starting with income disparity. - **Data and Verification**: Demonstrating that verifying income disparity can be deterministic and computable in reasonable time (in P) by crowdsourcing data from the population and having at least one person build a visualization (e.g., using D3). For issues like policing or digital infrastructure (such as Google Fiber deployments and utility pole policies), crowdsourced location and open government data guide where non-technical efforts should be targeted.

### Takeaways - Societal and government systems contain bugs that require civic engagement, code, and policy to patch. - Modern technology and crowdsourced data enable communities to verify whether proposed solutions actually reduce inequality in reasonable time. - Not all contributions require writing core technical code; similar to open-source software, meaningful impact arises from an aggregate of diverse efforts, from data submission to direct community advocacy. - Technical framing, mathematical boundaries, and deterministic testing can help break down daunting, large-scale societal challenges into addressable components.