UK Fundraising becomes ACAP-enabled
Howard Lake | 10 March 2008 | Blogs
UK Fundraising is now ACAP-enabled, meaning that it has joined a range of online publishers who are using the Automated Content Access Protocol, a universal permissions protocol on the Internet.
Devised by publishers in collaboration with search engine operators and other web content aggregators the protocol aims “to revolutionise the creation, dissemination, use, and protection of copyright-protected content” on the web.
UK Fundraising is at the early stages of enabling the site, which currently involves modifying the site’s “robots.txt” file to include ACAP permissions. The implementation can be refined by embedding permissions information directly in the web pages and other content themselves.
Is ACAP relevant to charities’ websites? Yes, if your charity is concerned about protecting and managing access and use to its content. ACAP themselves give the following reasons why you might want to implement the free resource:
* “because I care about how my online content is used and reused – and I want my business partners to be able to understand my policies.
* “because we need a standard for expressing these policies in machine-readable form – and ACAP is set to become the universal standard for policy expression.”
I’ve not spotted the ACAP-enabled logo on any charity websites, but would be interested to learn if anyone else has implemented it and whether it has benefited them or not.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.