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
"There’s no need to take notes; we’ve got session notes, sketch notes, and a resource list all provided."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
September 29, 2021
"It’s okay to be bossy because we need leaders who are opinionated and thoughtful and have a point of view."
Rachel Posman John Calhoun"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
September 25, 2024
"Many games are fully playable by the blind, despite being highly visual, through clever auditory cues and remapped controls."
Dane DeSutter Natalie Gedeon Deborah Hendersen Cheryl PlatzBeyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries
May 17, 2024
"There is no big idea — sometimes we just need to get the basics right and reset expectations."
Pippa LomasPaving the Path for Neurodiversity in Design
October 4, 2023
"Who works here anyways? I knew about immediate teams but beyond that, it was a fog."
Saara Kamppari-MillerCartography for Design Communities
September 10, 2025
"The tools are more important than ever even if the title UX becomes less central."
Greg PetroffExit Interview #1: Greg Petroff: From Silicon Valley Executive to Sonoma County Possibilitarian
September 24, 2025
"I fumed that my idea had been ignored, wondering if it was because I was new, a woman, brown, or had a PhD."
Nalini P. KotamrajuTwo Jobs in One: Being a “Leader who is a Researcher” and a “Researcher who is a Leader"
March 10, 2021
"When we build accessibility into an environment, especially if we do it subtly, it becomes the new normal."
Samuel ProulxFrom Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
September 10, 2025
"There is no solid way to control the course of your re-platforming project; being flexible is essential."
Malini RaoLessons Learned from a 4-year Product Re-platforming Journey
June 9, 2021
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can firsthand client involvement in field research contribute to long-term advocacy and support for ethnographic methods?
What strategies motivate cross-functional teams to input their research findings into a centralized repository?
Why do Survicate's researchers prefer starting with low-fidelity prototypes before high-fidelity?