Mis-Classified — Who Owns What Your Content Means?

Mis-Classified — Who Owns What Your Content Means? A hands-on governance workshop for the work that comes before you're AI-ready

Your agency may have a Chief Data Officer, a data inventory, records management, a governance board. Maybe several of those. And still, in most organizations, nobody owns the thing underneath all of it: what your content actually means. Which term is authoritative. What a category includes. Whose definition wins when two offices disagree.

That gap was survivable when the cost was a bad search result. It isn't now. A system that can't tell your source of truth from a stale draft still answers anyway: fluently, confidently, and wrong, in front of someone making a decision.

The Mis-Classified article argued that this foundation belongs at the strategy table, and ended on a question: where does this work sit in your organization today, and is that where it belongs? This workshop begins where the article left off.

It's a working session, not a talk. In two hours a small group will map where this work actually sits in their own organizations, then work through what a body that could own it requires: sponsorship, real decision rights, membership, what it settles first, and how to ask for subject-matter-expert time in a way a supervisor can actually approve.

Led by Aparna Darisipudi, who co-founded her federal bureau's first Data Council and its first Taxonomy Governance Team and served as the bureau's AI lead.

What you'll work toward: a clearer picture of where this work sits in your organization, where the gap is, and what a governance body that could own it would take, plus a first move to carry back.

Come thinking about one real system, site, or content domain you work on. We'll use it in the exercises.

Best for: program and digital service leads, content strategists, data and information managers, and anyone handed "governance" without a definition.

Limited to 12 participants.