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
"Collaborating with cross-functional peers is where the juice happens—it’s paramount to our success in design ops."
Dominique WardThe Most Exciting Time for DesignOps is Now
September 8, 2022
"Post-training on billions of examples is like training a dog over and over until it gets really good at reasoning and tool use."
Peter Van DijckBuilding impactful AI products for design and product leaders, Part 3: Understand AI architectures: RAG, Agents, Oh My!
July 30, 2025
"If you don’t have the time and organizational support, don’t do it because you only set a precedent of failure."
Sofia QuinteroBeyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
March 10, 2022
"Enterprise problems are often engineering problems as much as design problems."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
May 13, 2015
"Users want to feel that their dollars are making a difference and want clear storytelling about their impact."
Marissa Cui Rachel He Michael Leggett Manos SaratsisClimate Design Product Showcase
March 13, 2024
"Jenny and Will will take a foundational look at wielding data visualization and product analytics effectively."
Uday GajendarTheme Four Intro
June 6, 2023
"One digital accessibility lawsuit was filed every single hour in 2018."
Suzan Bednarz Hilary SunderlandAccessibilityOps for All
January 8, 2024
"Our bet was that distributing ownership would create more advocates and free bandwidth for strategic work."
Elizabeth Sklar Jessica ShengCo-creating research enablement with your tech org: a case study
March 10, 2026
"Cluster analysis is very useful if you want to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to product or service design."
Ricardo MartinsUnlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
March 12, 2025
