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
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The 1903 Baltimore fire exemplifies how a lack of shared technical standards prevents effective collaboration despite good intentions.
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Digital governance is an organizational decision-making framework, distinct from workflow or content approval processes.
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Ownership of digital governance is often fractured between marketing, IT, and other departments, causing conflicts and inefficiencies.
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Effective governance requires clarity about who defines digital strategy, writes policies, and sets standards—not just what those are.
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Governance teams operate on multiple layers: core leadership, distributed creators, working groups, community contributors, plus external vendors.
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External vendors can unintentionally increase organizational silos if they are not integrated into the governance framework.
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Technology adoption follows a long maturity arc: initial excitement, chaotic iteration with many variants, and eventual commoditized standards.
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Algorithmic bias reflects existing human and organizational biases; fixing systems requires first addressing cultural and structural issues.
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Defining digital safety with measurable standards and including diverse perspectives in design helps ensure ethical, inclusive outcomes.
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Participation in digital, internet, and web governance bodies is essential for shaping standards and policy that impact all digital work.
Notable Quotes
"If you don’t tune it properly, sometimes you just don’t get what you want."
"Governance is about decision making, not workflow processes."
"Nobody knows who’s supposed to decide what around digital, and that’s the problem."
"Digital is a system, not a project. It’s there all the time and you have to keep iterating on it."
"If you haven’t designed who your teams are and who your players are, expecting people to comply with standards won’t work."
"Governance frameworks can facilitate whatever an organization wants to do, fast or slow, loose or tight."
"In the automotive industry, most safety standards only became mandatory after governments intervened."
"Human biases are the real problem behind algorithmic bias, not the algorithms themselves."
"Everything that has been put online, someone like us made and put there; we bake our own biases into it."
"Governance isn’t about choking creativity, it’s about putting bounds and clarity that enable purposeful collaboration."
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