Speaker Profile: Jurnell Cockhren (@jcockhren)
Jurnell Cockhren is an avid open-source contributor and owner of Sophicware, a Nashville Tech Firm.
With over a decade of experience in creating and contributing to open source software, Jurnell has worked in various fields such as Neuroscience, Physics and Astronomy. It should be no surprise that when he graduated from the University of the South in 2007, it was with a double major in Math & Physics.
Jurnell’s professional progression allowed him to learn numerous programming languages such as ruby, perl, python, C/C++/C#, LISP and various SQL implementations. He now specializes in expressing cloud infrastructure as code and tackling the world of managing cloud-based services.
Jurnell will be presenting “Key to the City: A Thought Experiment on Writing Code to Induce Social Change.”
At this point in our human existence, we are witnesses to the problem set of Inequality in Society. Empathy drives us to want to recognize these bugs in our society. At times our personal biases, tribalism, individual circumstances and experiences distort the inequalities in this society from our view. What we know is that everyone is not afforded the same experiences, that this world treats everyone differently. Our empathy speaks, informing us that there are others living with persistent challenges crafted by history and by the actions of all citizens in aggregate. Those whose unfair treatment is left unaddressed by society serve as our verifiers for measuring how far we are from the goal post of equality in all social contexts. My hypothesis: There exists a surface area of influence that software development has on social justice that makes inequality in society solvable as an NP-Hard problem where any solutions to instances of inequality can be verified in polynomial time. Our hypothesis, empathy, source code, networking, resources and data, can help us build a model to minimize inequality. Our oppressed populations, act as the verifiers of our proposed solutions fully capable of responding in polynomial time.