Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Summary
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
"If people already love their process, you’re fighting their emotional state — start where dissatisfaction exists."
Andrew WebsterScaling Design Capability: How Involved Should You Be?
September 30, 2021
"41 percent of non-Western names are autocorrected into something else."
Samuel ProulxDesigning for Disability, Innovating for Everyone
March 11, 2025
"Assume positive intent, practice a service mindset, and curiosity over ego — remember we’re all in this together."
Asia HoePartnering with Product: A Journey from Junior to Senior Design
November 29, 2023
"Project pioneer organizations resist top-down control, needing design ops to provide tools allowing creative teams to pivot and adapt."
Frances YllanaDesignOps–Leading the Path to Parity
April 27, 2023
"Belonging means understanding the shape, size, and cause of your community and your unique purpose in it."
Daniel GloydWarming the User Experience: Lessons from America's first and most radical human-centered designers
May 9, 2024
"This conference felt like a professional bootcamp that helped me grow profoundly as a speaker and thinker."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Victor Udoewa Jennifer StricklandEverything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
May 17, 2022
"Noether’s breakthrough came because she was able to step back from the problem at hand and look at the broader system."
Jennifer FraserWhat would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
March 29, 2023
"The biggest mistake in any implementation is ignoring the emotional side of change management."
Sofia QuinteroBeyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
March 10, 2022
"I don’t know what I don’t know – new practitioners may not even realize what questions to ask at first."
Laine Riley Prokay Lisa GordonCarving a Path for Early Career DesignOps Practitioners
September 9, 2022
