Governance and harm

One of the two developed fundamentals delivered under the Resilience pillar in BRD-Strategy.

What it is

The policies, decision rules, and harm-assessment practices that keep the digital presence accountable to the people it affects. Most organizations have governance for legal compliance and almost nothing for the harms a digital presence can produce on the audience side: addictive patterns, manipulative defaults, unwelcome content, surveillance creep, exclusion by design. This deliverable names those gaps, fills them with policy where policy belongs, and writes the harm-assessment routine into how decisions get made.

What's included

• Governance map. Who decides what, with what authority, on the digital presence. Editorial decisions, product decisions, data decisions, partnership decisions, crisis decisions. Documented so the answer to "who can call this" exists before the next disagreement.
• Policies that belong here. Editorial policy, comments and moderation, partnership and sponsor criteria, crisis communication, public correction protocol, AI-use policy, social-media policy. Written or revised against your actual operations.
• Harm-assessment routine. A short, repeatable read applied to every significant new feature, content campaign, integration, or partnership: who could be harmed, how, by what mechanism, with what mitigation. Lightweight enough that it actually gets done.
• Conflict-of-interest register. Where the organization's interests might pull against its audiences' interests, named explicitly with the mitigation.
• Decision log convention. A simple practice for recording the decisions that matter so the next person can see how the current state was arrived at.

When you'd want this

• A decision was made recently that you would not have signed off on if you'd seen it in advance, and you want the structure that prevents the next one.
• You're growing the team and the implicit decision rules need to become explicit before someone new has to guess them.
• You're under public scrutiny (for any reason) and the governance you have is informal, undocumented, or non-existent.
• You make commitments about how you treat your audience and you want the practice that actually upholds them.