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
Dane DeSutter
Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Opening Remarks
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Amahra Spence
Designing for Liberation, Rehearsing Freedom
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Theme Two Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Jeff Sussna
What DesignOps Can Learn From DevOps
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Gillian Salerno-Rebic
Redefining Speed and Scale: How Accenture’s GrowthOS Uses AI-Simulated Insights to Reduce Risk and Accelerate Innovation
2025 • Designing with AI 2025
Gold
Maggie Dieringer
Cutting through the Noise
2020 • DesignOps Community
Lori Muszynski
Keeping Design Weird
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Turning UX Passion into Real Product Influence
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Samuel Proulx
From Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Conference
Catherine Blizzard
Using Integrated Insight to Drive Growth
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Tricia Wang
SCALE: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Simon Wardley
Maps and Topographical Intelligence
2019 • Enterprise Community
Louis Rosenfeld
Welcome / Housekeeping
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Sara Asche Anderson
Not Your Ordinary Re-Brand: Design's Path to Driving Customer Obsession at Best Buy
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Jen Cardello
Curating insight: Strategies for integrating knowledge across research functions
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos

Mackenzie Guinon

"This process does not end with getting someone in the door; how do we support and retain them to mastery and leadership?"

Mackenzie Guinon

M.C. Escher’s UX Research Career Ladder

March 9, 2022

Caroline Vize

"Demand for user research is increasing dramatically, but design hiring is outpacing research hiring by 34%."

Caroline Vize

The State of UX: Five Lessons from 2021 to Accelerate Digital Experience in 2022

March 9, 2022

Cara Maritz

"Delivering a clear request along with your project’s goal helps get buy-in and clarifies what collaborators need to provide."

Cara Maritz Rachel Ny

The Art of Extrapolation

March 29, 2023

Uday Gajendar

"Design has to incorporate intellectual humanism—remembering we’re designing for people, with people."

Uday Gajendar

The Rise of Meta-Design: A Starter Playbook

May 19, 2022

Kate Towsey

"Every operation is going to have whirlwinds and fires all the time; strategy doesn't end that."

Kate Towsey

Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey

April 2, 2025

Harry Max

"We got the board to write a check bigger than they’d ever spent because we had clarity on priorities and investment needs."

Harry Max

Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others

June 9, 2016

Jonathon Colman

"Content designers are almost always paid less than their peers, which contributes to the gender pay gap in design and tech."

Jonathon Colman

How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design

January 8, 2024

Scott Jensen

"Both of our perspectives changed, and now we’re seeing that come to fruition through the product we’re building."

Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen Liu

Short Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers

December 6, 2022

Sam Proulx

"The experience of using a screen reader is probably 10 times faster as you become more expert with it."

Sam Proulx

Designing For Screen Readers: Understanding the Mental Models and Techniques of Real Users

December 10, 2021