Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Summary
The Internet and Web have reached a tipping point. We’re now witnessing the surfacing of harmful patterns and norms that we designed—often unintentionally—into our products, services, and communities, and the world we live in. Designers who work in the enterprise are, like their peers in startups and big dotcoms, vulnerable and culpable and need to consider some big questions: How well do we manage our data? How inclusive are our development practices? How broadly and deeply do we think about the impact of what we build and deploy before we scale it for our customer base? We need to move forward with intent. We need to govern our digital spaces. A necessary first step towards that goal involves designers examining—with honesty and introspection—our role in the creation of what’s online. The World Wide Web is nothing more than the accumulation of what digital makers have put there. We made this mess, and we need to talk about how we are going to clean it up. Digital governance expert Lisa Welchman will reflect on how 25 years of passionate and agile web development got us where we are today, and the consequences of the lack of self-governance by the digital maker community. She will show us a path forward from this mess, outlining questions we can ask and steps we can take to govern better what we have created and what we will create in the future.
Key Insights
-
•
Digital governance is fundamentally about decision making and organizational responsibility, not just tools or workflows.
-
•
Many digital governance failures stem from unclear ownership of strategy, policy, and standards within organizations.
-
•
Collaborative governance involves multiple levels: core strategy teams, distributed content makers, working groups, and community contributors.
-
•
External vendors often deepen digital silos if not properly integrated into governance frameworks.
-
•
Governance can be designed to enable speed and innovation, not just control or restriction.
-
•
The internet and digital technologies undergo a lengthy maturation cycle similar to historic technologies like automobiles.
-
•
Algorithmic biases often reflect organizational biases; fixing algorithms requires fixing institutions.
-
•
Proactive digital safety can be conceptualized like crash-test dummies for online systems, focusing on inclusivity, morality, and safety.
-
•
Participation in internet and web governance organizations like W3C or the Internet Society is crucial but underutilized by digital professionals.
-
•
Generosity and sharing cultures, as exemplified by the development of the three-point seatbelt, are critical for progressing digital governance.
Notable Quotes
"People can have the same values and ideas but if you don’t tune them properly, you just don’t get what you want."
"Digital governance is about who’s supposed to make the decision, not what the decision is."
"Governance isn’t the byproduct of a project; digital is a system you have to design and iterate continuously."
"You can’t expect people to comply with standards if you don’t know who they are."
"Your external vendors may not have your organizational best interests at heart because it’s not their business model."
"Governance frameworks can facilitate whatever pace or style of work an organization wants."
"Every bad thing that can happen in the real world can now happen on the internet — and every good thing too."
"Human biases are the real problem behind algorithmic bias because organizations embed those biases first."
"We are the fix — everything online is made by people, so we can change it together."
"Governance participation isn’t optional if you want to avoid reactive impositions down the line."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Research has layers like an onion; we operate at multiple layers, from discovery to concept evaluation."
Anna Poznyakov Richa PrajapatiGet The Most Out Of Stakeholder Collaboration—and Maximize Your Research Impact
March 12, 2021
"Time is the only resource we cannot replenish. Make sure you don’t spend it doing what’s not meaningful."
Anna Avrekh Dr. John Pagonis Klara Pelcl Sina SchreiberExpert Panel: Leading in and with Research
March 10, 2022
"For many organizations, research is really not embedded completely and consistently into the development process."
Caroline VizeThe State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022
March 9, 2022
"We cannot be everywhere. So is the goal to conduct more studies faster? And we said no, it’s not. That’s poison."
Jen Cardello Jennifer OttoLearning Velocity—The Insights Speedometer
September 16, 2021
"Brianna cultivates a leadership ecosystem that not only adapts but thrives on rapid change."
Frances YllanaTheme 2 Intro
September 24, 2024
"You cannot have one trauma-informed principle without the other; you need them all like ingredients in a salad."
Carol Scott Melissa EgglestonAvoid Harming Your Team and Users: Promoting Care and Brand Reputation with Trauma-Informed UX Practices
February 5, 2025
"Involving non-researchers firsthand helps them understand research’s complexity and when to bring in experts."
Kathleen AsjesResearch Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
March 10, 2022
"Personas and journeys are all models we use in UX to manage complexity."
Scott PlewesWhy Isn't Your UX Approach Going Viral?: A Mathematical Model
March 28, 2023
"You will have zero successes if you’re not trying it all."
Jacqui Frey Alison RandSetting the Table for Dynamic Change
October 24, 2019
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can product design teams effectively adopt AI-assisted coding tools for prototyping?
What strategies help designers manage executives who overestimate AI’s ability to replace skilled work?
What are practical approaches to balance rapid AI-driven prototyping with maintaining brand and design system consistency?