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
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast, but culture isn’t something you can just buy or transplant."
Adam CutlerPeople + Places + Practices = Outcomes
June 8, 2016
"AI can help us cut through noise and speed up the so-what part of insights but can’t replace human knowledge of strategy and customers."
Michelle Bejian Lotia Anne-Marie MorellRolling Out a Repository: How Zapier Centralizes Insights from Across their Organization
March 28, 2023
"People’s ability to cope with information complexity isn’t increasing exponentially, so we need to find the perfect innovation space."
Kelly GotoEmotion Economy: Ethnography as Corporate Strategy
May 13, 2015
"This conference is the opportunity I saw to design an experience that felt personal to our community."
Bria AlexanderTheme Two Intro
October 3, 2023
"We use this data not to dehumanize, but to elevate each person’s uniqueness and fairly incentivize performance."
John Paul de Guzman10k Screens Later: How We Became a Data-Driven Design Organization
September 24, 2024
"You want to check your motivations and your understanding of the situation before any conversation."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Managing Ludicrous Requests at Work (Part 3 of 3)
May 12, 2025
"At our sprint meetings three times a week, we discuss if a piece of feedback has already been prioritized or needs attention."
Smitha Papolu Nova Wehman-Brown Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterTheme 3 Discussion
June 4, 2019
"Nobody has all the answers and we're human. That's okay."
Amy Gawronski ZuccaroAdvice for DesignOps Employee #1
September 29, 2021
"When you magnify prototypes, they may look blurry, but that’s something to fix in the final website design."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
December 8, 2021
