Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Gold
Thursday, June 14, 2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Share the love for this talk
Cleaning Up Our Mess: Digital Governance for Designers
Speakers: Lisa Welchman
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jonathan Fairman
Integrating generative AI into enterprise products: A case study from dscout
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Aiyana Bodi
Three Key Climate Initiatives and How You Can Help
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Bria Alexander
Charting the future of DesignOps: A community workshop
2024 • DesignOps Community
Sarah Kinkade
Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa
Play to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Abby Covert
Stuck? Diagrams Help
2022 • DesignOps Community
Neil Barrie
Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Renee Reid
Becoming a ResearchH.E.R (Highly Enterprise Ready)
2019 • Enterprise Experience 2019
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
2022 • Civic Design Community
Sam Ladner
How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
George Zhang
UX Research Excellence Framework
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Francesca Barrientos, PhD
You Need Your Own Definition of Design Maturity
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Product and Design at Bloomberg: A 15-year Evolution
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Jose Coronado
People First - Design at JP Morgan
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sam Proulx
Mobile Accessibility: Why Moving Accessibility Beyond the Desktop is Critical in a Mobile-first World
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Rachel Radway
The Many Paths Of Design Operations
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold

More Videos

Christopher Taylor Edwards

"Psychological safety comes from having hard conversations upfront and requires demonstration from leadership."

Christopher Taylor Edwards Valerie Roske

Design as a Team Practice, A Practical Guide to Cross-functional Collaboration

September 30, 2021

Sarah Kinkade

"Pairing up as design soulmates was the first foundation that made all the difference for Signified’s design journey."

Sarah Kinkade Mariana Ortiz-Reyes

Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation

June 8, 2022

Ian Swinson

"A workshop helps people map their skills, identify gaps, and make specific goals for career jumps."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Lija Hogan

"Alan Cooper created personas to stop developers building features just because they're cool to build, not because users need them."

Lija Hogan

Contexts of Use: A Framework for Connection

December 9, 2021

Joerg Beringer

"The system is live now analyzing audience-submitted tasks and producing results in minutes."

Joerg Beringer Thomas Geis

Scaling User Research with AI: Continuous Discovery of User Needs in Minutes

September 10, 2025

Josh Clark

"Sentient design is about intelligent interfaces that are aware of context and intent so they can be radically adaptive to user needs in the moment."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)

January 29, 2025

Jeff Sussna

"I thought design ops was about bringing together design and IT operations, but I was wrong and that’s okay."

Jeff Sussna

What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps

November 6, 2017

Spencer L. A. Stultz

"It is your job to design systems and processes that work for all people."

Spencer L. A. Stultz

Why Social Justice Frameworks are Necessary for Successful DEI/JEDI Initiatives

October 4, 2023

Jack Moffett

"SAFe is very developer-centric and was originally designed for construction—the code production part of software."

Jack Moffett

SAFe or Sorry?

May 29, 2019