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
"Connection means feeling seen, heard, and valued; that’s what creates psychological safety."
Alla WeinbergDesign Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It
September 9, 2022
"We can’t force people to partner with design, but if partnering makes it easier to meet framework requirements, that’s a win for everyone."
Jess GrecoCreating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"We can't say with certainty what needs or pain points we missed when our recruits weren't demographically diverse."
Megan CamposWhat Did I Miss? The Hidden Costs of Deprioritizing Diversity in User Research
March 12, 2021
"Ethics is not just about compliance; it’s about doing the right thing holistically."
Sheryl Cababa Ethan Marcotte Milena PribicDay 2 Panel
June 5, 2024
"Your partners need to trust that you are going to make their goals your goals."
Jess GrecoClaiming your power: Practical tools for amplifying your unique voice
March 13, 2025
"AI-moderated interviews will help drill down on depth without sacrificing scalability or requiring scheduling moderators."
Andy Barraclough Betsy NelsonFrom Costly Complexity to Efficient Insights: Why UX Teams Are Switching To Voxpopme
September 23, 2024
"We set the system usability scale score as a KPI for all products to improve measurement and usability."
Vasileios XanthopoulosA Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approach to User-Centric Maturity at Scale
January 8, 2024
"Getting designers into a cadence of reviewing work with senior stakeholders was not a muscle the team had built."
Maggie DieringerCreating Consistency Through Constant Change
January 8, 2024
"Sometimes you just need to do something completely different than what you’re working on."
Maria SkaadenPanel Discussion: Methodologies and Work Environments
November 8, 2018
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What strategies help UX teams translate usability findings into stakeholder-relevant outcomes like cost savings or risk reduction?
How can human-centric companion metrics be paired with traditional business metrics?
How does UX Tweak approach integrating AI features responsibly into their UX research platform?