Coded Values is a research and publishing project about how governance actually works: how the rules, habits, and instruments that shape a place come to exist, whom they serve, and what it would take to design them on purpose.
The idea it starts from
Every governance system runs something like an algorithm. A set of rules and habits for deciding what counts as a problem, who gets to decide, and what happens next. That algorithm rests on assumptions about what is valuable and what is real, and it is almost always inherited rather than chosen. Usually nobody wrote it down, and nobody can point to the moment it was adopted. It simply runs.
The working claim of this project is that two such algorithms are at work in most places at once. One is reciprocal. It is carried in practice, in how people and institutions actually treat each other, and it resists being written down. The other is extractive, and it is codified: written into statute, funding formulas, zoning, and administrative rule. Being written down is what lets it outlast the people who built it.
Both are inherited. Neither was chosen. Only one of them is written down, and that asymmetry does a great deal of the work.
Why Northeastern Pennsylvania
The project studies ten counties in Northeastern Pennsylvania, with a closer look at Luzerne County. This is anthracite country: a region that powered an industrial era and then carried the costs of its ending.
The pattern is unusually legible here. An economy organized around extraction, the institutions that grew up around it, what happened when the industry left, and what is being proposed now on the ground it left behind. The region is not a case chosen for convenience. It is where this work is done, and where its conclusions have to hold.
How the work is done
Evidence first, from four holdings.
- A data layer of public datasets running from 1969 to 2026, at county, municipality, and neighbourhood scale.
- Primary sources, meaning books, studies, and the reports institutions write about themselves, read and questioned directly rather than quoted from memory.
- A media archive of 78,472 articles from 224 sources between 2009 and 2026, which records what was reported and when.
- A knowledge base of the project’s own notes, where every claim has an address and is traceable to whatever supports it.
Claims carry grades. Where the evidence is thin, the work says so plainly rather than writing around it. Where a new finding contradicts something published earlier, the correction is recorded and dated rather than quietly fixed.
What this work will not do
Analysis here targets structures, never persons. A funding formula, a zoning rule, a board’s composition, and a coalition’s incentives are all fair objects of study. The individuals who occupy those roles are not. The central claim of the framework is that structures produce outcomes largely regardless of who fills them, which is precisely why naming individuals explains so little.
The purpose is to reduce harm and to build durable, less extractive cooperation. None of it exists to punish or to damage anyone.
On the use of AI
Artificial intelligence is used substantially in this project, for retrieval across large archives, for research synthesis, and for drafting. That use is disclosed wherever the work appears. Interpretation, judgment, and every published claim remain human decisions.
The method is also part of the subject. What it means to do civic research with these tools, what they make visible, and what they should not be trusted to decide are questions this project treats as its own.
What is coming
A book. A public knowledge base of the framework and the terms it uses. Reports on the region, including a running record of where development decisions actually get made and who is given a hearing. And instruments that people already doing governance work here can pick up and use.
It is written for anyone trying to understand why a place turned out the way it did, and for anyone working to change how its decisions get made.