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
"We treat our shared tooling and design system as a product with a dedicated team maintaining reusable components and governance."
Shawna Hein Kevin HoffmanCreate a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
November 17, 2022
"Empathy in design has been too focused on people and often on standardized personas rather than true diversity and marginalized voices."
Christian BasonExpand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges
September 14, 2022
"It costs less to keep the customers you have than to acquire new ones."
Andrew Custage Michael MallettThe Digital Journey: Research on Consumer Frustration and Loyalty
March 29, 2023
"Onboarding is critical; the first five minutes an engineer spends working with a system defines their experience."
Nathan CurtisDesign Systems for Us: How Many One-Source(s)-of-Truth Are Enough?
January 17, 2019
"If it didn’t come from Amazon or Costco, I probably don’t own it because I know the experience will be consistent."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
March 28, 2023
"Every major brand has a dark side brought to you by design on purpose, 40 hours a week."
George AyeThat Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide
November 16, 2022
"Many knowledge systems have little ability to create new interfaces, but their experience can be shaped by how they’re used and configured."
Ren PopeBuilding Experiences for Knowledge Systems
June 6, 2023
"AI can’t experience data subjectively or fulfill curiosity, which drives human insight and discovery in qualitative research."
Weidan LiQualitative synthesis with ChatGPT: Better or worse than human intelligence?
June 4, 2024
"Planning is essential, but plans are useless."
Jen BriselliLearning Is The Engine: Designing & Adapting in a World We Can’t Predict
April 16, 2025
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What human oversight processes are necessary to ensure the accuracy and relevance of AI-enhanced research repositories?
What privacy and security considerations arise when using AI with participant data in research tools?
How have changes in communication technologies historically affected collective knowledge building, and what might AI's role be?