Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Gold
Thursday, June 14, 2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Share the love for this talk
Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Speakers: Lisa Welchman
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Kristin Skinner
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Natalia Radywyl
Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jilanna Wilson
Distributed Design Operations Management
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Husani Oakley
Bias Towards Action: Building Teams that Build Work
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Roy Opata Olende
How Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users
2020 • Advancing Research Community
Kim Lenox
Leading Distributed Global Teams
2019 • Enterprise Community
Shipra Kayan
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Michelle Morrison
Practice What You Preach
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Patrizia Bertini
Designing Within the Lines: How the EU AI Act Can Spark Better AI Innovation
2025 • DesignOps Community
Cassini Nazir
The Dangers of Empathy: Toward More Responsible Design Research
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Anupama Dhareshwar
From blueprint to bot: Designing resilient AI-powered services
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Jose Coronado
From Zero to Hero
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Sam Ladner
Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Bruce Gillespie
Learning from journalism: Balancing impactful communication with compassionate storytelling
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Christian Bason
Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges
2022 • Civic Design Community

More Videos

Shawna Hein

"Designers contribute experimental patterns back to the design system early, making their work visible even before full validation."

Shawna Hein Kevin Hoffman

Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts

November 17, 2022

Bria Alexander

"Junior engineers often resent having to create OKRs that feel disconnected from their day-to-day work."

Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie Goldthorpe

OKRs—Helpful or Harmful?

January 20, 2022

Matt LeMay

"We need to reclaim the value and importance of facilitation as strategically critical work."

Matt LeMay

You Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything

December 6, 2022

Renee Bouwens

"Being nimble means sometimes you have to throw out academic rigor and just do what’s practical at the moment."

Renee Bouwens

Landing Product Impact: Aligning Research as a Foundational Driver for Delivering the World’s Best Products

December 15, 2023

Alnie Figueroa

"It’s not about saying yes to everything; it’s about picking projects aligned with company strategy, user experience impact, and where you can truly add value."

Alnie Figueroa

Teamwork: Strategies for Effective Collaboration with Other Program Management Teams

September 8, 2022

Corey Nelson

"Taking time to intentionally create a career strategy helps avoid reactive decisions based on fear."

Corey Nelson Amy Santee

Layoffs

November 15, 2022

Marina Martin

"This new vets.gov site is extremely easy. I have not had this level of ease with a government website at all."

Marina Martin

Lives on the Line: The Stakes of UX at the Scale of Government

June 14, 2018

Daniel J. Rosenberg

"The FDA-approved agile process is more like a controlled waterfall with strict traceability, especially for Class 3 devices."

Daniel J. Rosenberg

Digital Medicine Design

September 26, 2019

Irina Tikhonova

"Big projects tend to get out of hand and scare stakeholders, so starting small is key to scaling impact."

Irina Tikhonova Kari Dietrich

Small Wins, Big Impact: Leveraging and Elevating User Engagement

December 9, 2021