The cancellation is a big disappointment. The key speakers could no longer make it so we tried to find someone else at short notice to give a neutral, authoritative overview of the legal situation. Sadly, without success.

And I know, from bitter experience, that clear information about this law is hard to find.

So I’ve pulled together some key documents, which I hope will help you to make sense of the situation.

Guidance on the use of cookies

• Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO; the enforcing authority)
  • Guidance on the rules on use of cookies and similar technologies
• International Chamber of Commerce UK
  • ICC UK Cookie Guide

Enforcement

• Enforcing the revised Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) [ICO]

About cookies

• Understanding cookies
• Identifying the cookies your website sets
• AllAboutCookies.org

Implementing an opt-in solution

I hope these are useful.

PS: If you signed up for the seminar you should have received an email, very similar to this blog post, a couple of days ago.

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Cookie Control creates an opt-in for your visitors that is clear, uncluttered and unobtrusive.

You can tell it whether to pop up when the page is loaded, how long to pop up for, where to position it, and what you’d like it to say.

All you need to do is tell it the text you want, the link to your cookie policy and whether to include Google Analytics in the opt-in process.

That last bit alone is very neat, as it means you have control over the thorny issue of Google Analytics.

Analytics cookies are not exempt from the law, but the Information Commissioner’s Office says it is ‘highly unlikely’ that such cookies will be used to prioritise enforcement.

Therefore we have to decide ourselves whether setting analytics cookies is likely to get us into hot water.

Just remember that the cookie guidelines are not as black and white as some might like (I’ve collated links to some of the key documents).

Indeed, Cookie Control’s refreshingly user-friendly terms and conditions warn us that the developers are not lawyers, and that we must use this tool at our own discretion.

Cookie Control is free, very quick and simple, and can be used for as many websites as you like.

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Here I give some ways of finding that out. I’ve done it for three Windows browsers (the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome). It’s imperfect because in other tools I was given slightly different results (this may be to do with caching, I don’t know), but it’s a start.

Internet Explorer 9

1. Visit the website you want to find cookies for.
2. Press F12, or click Tools > F12 developer tools. The screen should split in two.
3. In the lower half of the newly split screen, click Cache > View cookie information.
4. In the main browser window you should now see a list of those cookies that are set by that site. You don’t get as much information as you do in other browsers, but it’s a good start.

Chrome

1. Visit the website you want to find cookies for.
2. Click CTRL + SHIFT + I, or click the spanner icon then select Tools > Developer tools. The screen should split in two.
3. In the lower half of the newly split screen, click Resources.
4. Expand the ‘Cookies’ menu and click on the domain name of the site you want cookies for.
5. You should see a table of all the cookies being set by that website, including the domains they’re being set from (ie which are set directly and which are set by third parties).

Firefox

I offer you two possible routes for Firefox. The first requires the Web Developer extension, the second requires the Firebug  and Firecookie extensions.

Web Developer extension

1. Install the Web Developer extension.
2. Visit the website you want to find cookies for.
3. Click ‘Cookies’ in the Web Developer toolbar, or go to Tools > Web Developer > Cookies > View cookie information tools. The screen should split in two.
4. In the lower half of the newly split screen, click Resources.
5. You should now see a list of those cookies that are set by this site, similar to that shown by IE 9. You don’t get as much information as you do using Firebug (see below), but it’s a good start.

Firebug extension

1. Install the Firebug extension.
2. Install the Firecookie extension.
3. Visit the website you want to find cookies for.
4. Press F12. The screen should split in two.
5. In the lower half of the newly split screen, click Cookies.
6. You should now see a table of those cookies that are set by this page only.
7. However, you can export all the site cookies as a tab-delimited text file by clicking the ‘Cookies’ drop-down in the sub-menu.

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It was a re-working of an existing flowchart, and in trying to simplify the language I had, inadvertently, made the first ‘yes’ thread a little confusing. I have now tidied that up, at last.

Download the flowchart from my original post

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It came from a chat with Jon Bounds, who in turn had been chatting with Jez Collins about spreading music-related trivia. It’s a bit of fun really, but it could be a nice way to complement the blue plaques that we see on buildings; particularly as the criteria for those seem both well-guarded and arbitrary.

So I built a web page, set up a page on Facebook and started a Twitter account. Jon has been busy adding information to locations, and trying to get that information plotted to a map.

I’ve blogged before about how these tools can be used to spread the control of information-sharing more democratically. Of course there’s always the danger of sabbotage, but to be honest I’ve no more reason to trust the existing blue plaques than I have to trust Jon Bounds. Oh, hang on…

Anyway, we want to encourage the use of the hashtag #bp to become a common way to denote historical information. Just leave your gems of historical information on geo-location services such as Foursquare and add the hashtag to your comment. If you can also leave a link to further information, then so much the better.

Visit the Electronic Civic Council web page

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I’ve recently been struggling a bit with explaining why I think an organisation’s web presence need not be concentrated onto one ‘front page’, and this analogy is the best I’ve come up with so far.

A large public park may have any number of entrances, but it will usually have a main one. Often this main entrance will contain a reception desk, or even a visitors’ centre, where you can find out all about the park and its features. These may include its history, its opening times and the location of ponds, picnic areas and any branded franchises (such as coffee shops or cafes).

However, many visitors to the park will enter through different entrances. Therefore in order to find their way around they need to be given clear and appropriate signs (too much signage, for example, will distract and confuse them, and will quite likely spoil the nature of the park).

Each feature could be moved somewhere else and nothing about it would suggest it had ever had a connection with the park; it is the design of the park itself that gives them that clear context.

And so it is, I think, with an organisation’s web presence. It may include a number of different projects, but these needn’t all be vying for place on a front page. Indeed, the front page should be clear about its purpose and able to help visitors get to the bits that are of interest to them; it shouldn’t be choking under the weight of every aspect of the organisation’s work. And it shouldn’t be promoting something simply because someone thinks that putting it on the front page will magically do their communications work for them: it won’t; in fact, if everyone did that (and they often do) it would probably only serve to dilute it.

Each piece of an organisation’s work should concentrate on achieving its own goals and reaching its own audiences (firmly in the context of the broader organisational strategy, of course); the larger web presence – or, rather, the strategic collection of the organisation’s elements on the internet – should be managed in such a way that each of these disparate elements are recognisable within it and are enabled to flourish.

That’s all great in theory; currently I don’t do any of this very well in practice (but I’m trying). I thought I’d post it anyway though, in case the park analogy is useful to anyone else.

Update

Just to make it clear, I’m not advocating silos. A branch of an organisation needs to have the freedom and flexibility to meet its own strategic goals, but it must also allow visitors easily to navigate and make sense of the organisation’s work as a whole.

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In Smart Swarm Peter Miller explains how lessons from the natural world have already changed dramatically the way we work. These lessons illustrate how our individual interactions with our local environment can have a profound effect on the behaviour of society as a whole.

The author shows how an understanding of swarms (that is, groups of independent individuals aware only of their immediate neighbours) has saved the lives of hundreds of Muslim pilgrims, increased efficiency at Boeing and demonstrated that physical town meetings can be far more beneficial than virtual ones, even if they are less convenient. ’Citizens who talk to one another,’ he writes, ‘Give themselves a better chance to make smart decisions.’

I’m often wary of books like this. They come packed with kudos from the forward-thinkers in communication, which can give them an aura of game-changing brilliance (or at least the impression that they provide remarkable new insight into human behaviour). Often though they seem simply to be expounding common sense, backed up by examples and seasoned with the occasional ‘wow!’ moment. So, if I’ve been expecting a greater intellectual challenge from a book I can be left feeling underwhelmed.

What’s refreshing about Smart Swarm (to me, at least) is that, while it’s part of the discourse around developments in human communication, it’s not written by a ‘social media guru’. Instead Peter Miller, who is in fact senior editor of National Geographic, demonstrates how lessons from nature justify some of the theories posited by those gurus.

He shows us how ants are better than we are at planning business travel, how successfully bees use dancing competitions to decide the best nesting spot, how termites can teach us a thing or two about air conditioning and why locusts suddenly change from shy individuals into massive, marauding swarms (apparently it’s because they’re cannibals).

I enjoyed this book; it was engaging, entertaining and thought-provoking. Miller narrates the extraordinary discoveries of scientists and their application to complex logistical conundrums with a lightness and craft that makes them intriguing and easy to understand.

I haven’t figured out yet if this book has had a more profound effect on me than providing a few hours of pleasurable reading, but that really doesn’t matter. And besides, maybe I never will; perhaps I’m too small a player to be able to see the bigger picture. Maybe, in a hundred years or so, an anthropologist will argue that profound changes in human behaviour can be traced directly to the group of individuals who read Smart Swarm. And for that reason alone you should read it.

This was written for the good folk at Delib, who very kindly supplied the book.

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(This is a very under-developed thought; I’m only putting it here because it’s too long for Twitter.)

I never buy the Financial Times, but I used to read the website before they started charging for content. So at that point I lost out on that news perspective. When other traditional media outlets start charging for online content I don’t expect I will want to pay for those either.

But Rupert Murdoch isn’t stupid, and I rather suspect that his paid-for news model has legs. Although there are plenty of other places to get content for free, they don’t have the same influence with the public and with policy makers; and, more importantly, they don’t command the same level of recognition and trust.

So does that mean that people who currently see themselves as connected, and to some degree influential, will either find themselves forced to pay for news content or face losing that connection?

Has the free news model given people a place in society that they are in danger of losing?

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Since nothing happened the first time I tweeted, I suspect that Chiltern were not using Twitter then. However, when I tweeted again recently…

“I’ve asked before & I’ll ask again: whose stupid idea was it to put a fixed, redundant arm on the window side of Chiltern Train seats? Grr.”

they were quick to respond:

“@citizensheep I’ll find out. Do you have a direct email address so I can get an answer for you?”

Wow. I felt quite ashamed by the tone of my tweet, and I made that clear in our subsequent email exchange. I was briefly in contact with Emma, who was personal, friendly and helpful; she offered to take my enquiries to colleagues and promised to keep me informed, even though it could take a while.

Today I got another email from Emma, with a helpful response about arm rests:

“This was standard on the refurbished fleet. The twin seats have three arm rests, one at each end, and one between the two seats. I believe that the aisle-side arm rest and the central arm rest are moveable to allow for easy seat access for people of reduced mobility, or those who are of a slightly larger disposition. The window-side arm rests are fixed as this is not a requirement in this position.  Essentially, it is a copy of the original train seating – we have not changed it, but your comments about the fixed arm rests have been noted by our engineering department.” [my bold]

So, Chiltern Railways, today you win at communication.

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This is simply not possible anymore, and attempting it just makes you seem heavy-handed and out of touch. Far better to listen to what other people are saying about you and engage when appropriate.

The US Air Force produced a useful guide to blog assessment which susequently found its way onto the internet. It’s good, but I wanted something more generic, in plainer English, and more suitable for UK Third Sector organisations.

So I’ve had a crack at making my own version, which you can download here. It’s released under a Creative Commons licence so you can re-hash it providing you don’t do so for commercial gain.

Download my flowchart for managing online reputations (pdf).

Have you found this flowchart helpful? If so, I’d love to hear how. Either leave a comment below or use this form.

Update: 26 February 2012

I have made a minor tweak to the pdf. I have changed the heading of the first ‘yes’ thread, making its relationship to the subsequent choices a bit clearer.

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