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
"Design is deeply entrenched in emotional intelligence; it’s about understanding the question beneath the question."
Steve ChaparroBringing Into Alignment Brand, Culture and Space
August 13, 2020
"We created Tiger teams that work like cancer cell hunters, targeting isolated problems and then dissolving after their work is done."
Maria GiudiceRemaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
June 9, 2016
"The ride along is a richer experience than watching session recordings because you can interact in real time."
Roy Opata OlendeHow Zapier Uses ‘All Hands Research’ to Increase Exposure to Users
August 6, 2020
"Think of AI more like a junior associate, a really powerful one, not a replacement."
Louis Rosenfeld Billy Carlson Jon Fukuda Maria TaylorHow AI will Change DesignOps Tooling
October 3, 2023
"Research is at a critical moment as relational dynamics between participants, organizations, and researchers shift from linear to plural and relational."
Jemma Ahmed Megan Blocker Eduardo OrtizRedefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world
March 12, 2025
"If you have a feeling you’re having the same conversation over and over, a canvas like this can ratchet the conversation forward."
Dave GrayGroup Activity: Making Sense of DesignOps
November 7, 2017
"Design operators continuously improve the circumstances for designers and the design organization to increase the chances of good design happening."
Peter BoersmaHow to Define and Maintain a DesignOps Roadmap
October 3, 2023
"You have to keep the fight, keep looking back at where you started."
JD Buckley Margot Dear Jim Kalbach Janaki KumarCOMMUNICATE: Discussion
June 14, 2018
"If you partner with grassroots organizations, they can help not only with recruiting but trust building and getting your name out there."
Sam ProulxDesigning For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
September 30, 2021
