Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
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 created separate tracks so people can self-organize, leverage the right skills, and grow their careers in focused ways."
Rachel Posman John CalhounA Closer Look at Team Ops and Product Ops (Two Sides of the DesignOps Coin)
November 19, 2020
"In procurement, throwing things over the fence just doesn’t work; collaboration builds trust."
Melissa Eggleston Maya Israni Florence Kasule Owen Seely Andrea SchneiderPractical People Skills for Building Trust on Teams and with Partners
December 9, 2021
"Instead of pretending neutrality, be open and transparent about the research agenda with participants."
Bilan HashiThe Tension Between Story Collecting and Story Telling in Research
March 10, 2021
"Quarterly milestone planning can help take the big annual rocks and break them down into manageable chunks throughout the year."
Cassandra PiesterDeveloping and Deploying Your Design Operations Strategy
September 24, 2024
"What's weak feedback? Vague, off target, or late stuff like make it pop or opinions with no owner or next step."
Vanessa VarinFeedback: The Other F-Word
September 10, 2025
"Design is an intention for change, not just a solution handed off to engineering."
Dolly ParikhExit Interview #7: Journey of a Social Entrepreneur
May 21, 2026
"There is no one right way to do things; this is deeply contextual work."
Matt LeMayYou Don’t “Get” Anyone to Do Anything
December 6, 2022
"Make a note when something about your design process doesn't feel right—discomfort is a guide to curiosity and improvement."
Tricia WangThe most popular design thinking strategy is BS
January 27, 2022
"Designers wandering the halls won’t survive without a safe space made up of roles, processes, and infrastructure."
Dan WillisFilling the Void
November 7, 2018
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can designers validate AI tools to ensure they do not cause harm or misinterpretation by users?
How can non-developers generate production-useful prototypes without coding knowledge using AI tools like Cursor?
What are the limitations of AI in ensuring compliance and up-to-date policy adherence?