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
Russell Blair
Killing the blank page
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Neil Barrie
Widening the Aperture: The Case for Taking a Broader Lens to the Dialogue between Products and Culture
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Craig Villamor
Resilient Enterprise Design
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Emily DiLeo
Stronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2024
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
The Future of Research: Bridging the Gaps
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Sheryl Cababa
Living in the Clouds: Adopting a Systems Thinking Mindset
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Julie Baher
Culture Change—My Journey
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Uday Gajendar
From AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Bassel Deeb
Do More With Less: Equip and Lead Design Orgs Through Adversity
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
John Maeda
About Design Organizations
2019 • DesignOps Community
Marc Fonteijn
Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Theme 2 Intro
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Sam Proulx
Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Doug Powell
DesignOps and the Next Frontier: Leading Through Unpredictable Change
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Nancy Douyon
We'll Figure That Out in the Next Launch: Enterprise Tech's Nobility Complex
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold

More Videos

Kurt McCulloch

"Giving people time and space to think individually and pressure test with AI before group discussion prevents dominance by power."

Kurt McCulloch

Faster alone, further together: Rebuilding collaboration in the age of AI research

March 10, 2026

Craig Brookes

"Content design is nascent and often misunderstood, but embedding content designers improves product clarity and usability."

Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn

"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood

June 11, 2021

Bill Scott

"Organizations contain antibodies—cultural forces that resist change."

Bill Scott

Lean Engineering: Engineering for Learning and Experimentation in the Enterprise

May 14, 2015

Husani Oakley

"This is a journey with no end, and it’s amazing that we can continue the conversation beyond this session."

Husani Oakley

Theme Two Intro

June 6, 2023

Jorge Arango

"Vision types help us envision ideal futures freed from near-term constraints but must avoid magical thinking."

Jorge Arango

Meeting of the Waters: Designing for Successful Inorganic Growth

August 12, 2021

Kate Koch

"Super speed means enabling rapid onboarding by centralizing and streamlining a previously disparate process."

Kate Koch Prateek Kalli

Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX

September 30, 2021

Sol Mesz

"Big picture thinkers move past obstacles and create unexpected paths and new solutions."

Sol Mesz

Hands or Brains? How to Hire for Strategy, Strategically

January 8, 2024

Jay Bustamante

"Embrace the role of party planner with your expertise to shape ethical AI innovation."

Jay Bustamante

Navigating the Ethical Frontier: DesignOps Strategies for Responsible AI Innovation

October 2, 2023

Dave Malouf

"For every single component, we start with its purpose and emergent need to ground design in user experience."

Dave Malouf Amy Thibodeau

Panel: Design Systems and Documentation

November 7, 2017