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
"An OKR coach told us to think of OKRs like a health panel at a physical—you have KPIs for status and OKRs for change targets."
Bria Alexander Benson Low Natalya Pemberton Stephanie GoldthorpeOKRs—Helpful or Harmful?
January 20, 2022
"The Guild is much more than a community; it’s actively driving standards and creating conditions for success across the company."
Jess GrecoCreating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"There’s an African proverb that says if you wanna go fast, you go alone. But if you wanna go far, go together."
Jamika BurgeEmbracing change: Navigating shifting landscapes with compassion and agency
March 11, 2025
"You don’t have to be a researcher to do research ops; people from marketing or HR backgrounds learn on the job and bring valuable perspectives."
Saskia LiebenbergStart Small for Big Impact
May 15, 2019
"Qualitative research is excellent for discovering needs but poor at quantifying their scale or priority."
Michaela MoraAdvanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
March 11, 2022
"The most successful programs meet stakeholders at their highest point of motivation to participate in research."
Trisha TerharEmpathizing with the Empowered: Non-Researcher Responses to Democratization
March 10, 2022
"Film is not just a way to capture information, it’s a way to think about information."
Bas Raijmakers, PhD (RCA) Charley Scull Prabhas PokharelWhat Design Research can Learn from Documentary Filmmaking
March 11, 2022
"We decided not to chase shiny objects because we wanted to stay true to our mission."
Briana ThomasThe Quiet Force: Uncovering Hidden Leadership in High-Impact Design Teams
September 24, 2024
"Before design operations was a thing, design managers had to do everything, from recruiting to career ladders."
Jose CoronadoFrom Zero to Hero
September 8, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can national development agencies strategically manage their innovation portfolios to balance risk and impact?
How can bias awareness training improve the quality of democratized research?
How prevalent are explicit standards of design quality within design teams compared to engineering standards?