Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Summary
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
"This interface could field any request, no matter how it was formatted, and adapt its entire form in its response."
Josh Clark Veronika KindredSentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI
June 9, 2026
"If there’s no plan or no handoff after the vision, then the vision feels like an artifact that has no legs."
Catt SmallCraft a Vision that Actually Gets Shipped
April 30, 2026
"People often change their entire selves just to seem educated or fit in at work."
Jackie Velasquez-RossTalent Acquisition and Our Responsibility
June 16, 2020
"If you haven’t taken command and control of your story someone else has, and it’s likely not the story you want to be told."
Jon FukudaStorytelling for DesignOps
August 17, 2023
"People were doing incentives in different ways, using their own cards, which was confusing, so I centralized it."
Liza Pemstein Jane DavisScaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever
March 27, 2023
"Skills are like onboarding material for the model; you write them as simple markdown files that describe workflows or tools."
Peter Van DijckHands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
October 22, 2025
"Survival can feel like a roller coaster with big energy spikes and drops, often leaving us completely depleted."
Ariba JahanTeam Resiliency Through a Pandemic
January 8, 2024
"The tool is only as good as the intention behind its design; we build AI the dscout way with transparency and ethics."
Taylor KlassmanThe Evolution of UX Research Platforms
March 10, 2026
"Gaming is often framed as this sort of subculture that only gamers do."
Deanna MitchellDesigning with culture: Unlocking impactful insights for Product and UX
March 12, 2025
