The 'Community of Communities' - now a Royal College of Psychiatrists Quality Improvement Network - first appeared on the Internet in 2000, as captured on the Internet Archive Waybackmachine in October 2000:  www.pettarchiv.org.uk/atc-community-of-communities.htm . The Community of Communities' first newsletter - albeit shared jointly with the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Charterhouse Group, and PETT - first appeared in 2004. The first website for the Association of Therapeutic Communities, for the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities, and even for the Cassel Hospital, like 'Community of Communities', all made their first appearances as subsites of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre.

For a very interesting romp through the whirlwind past 15 years of online therapeutic community history, go to http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pettarchiv.org.uk/* and browse. Explanation at the bottom of this page.

Websites created, developed and managed by PETT

1998-2005 The website of the Association of Therapeutic Communities. Having created the first website for the ATC, the offer was made to ATC members generally to create sub-websites for them. Two took the offer up.  Use the Waybackmachine above or the links that follow to see the ATC websites of Gartree Therapeutic Community and Francis Dixon Lodge.

ATC 1999 Click here to see what the ATC website looked like in 1999

ATC 2001 Click here to see what it looked like two years later

1998- 2005 Cassel Hospital: The Archive and Study Centre created the Cassel Hospital site in 1998 as a subhosted account - www.pettarchiv.org.uk/cassel - and handed it over to the Cassel itself in the autumn of 2003. Ownership of the Domain Name was transferred to the Cassel in 2005.

1998-2005 FSG: The website for the Society of Archivists Film and Sound Group. It housed the website for the Group's "Celebrating Memory: An oral history of the Society of Archivists and its Members" project, co-ordinated by archivist Craig Fees as part of the Society of Archivists' 50th anniversary celebrations.

2000-2005 Charterhouse Group: Because of livery changes within the organisation, the website of the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities was created twice; a labour-intensive task because it was in old fashioned manual html, without css.  Initially, the Charterhouse Group helped with the costs of their website, but from October 2003 all subhosting, domain renewal and upkeep work and costs came out of the Archive budget.

CHG 2000 Click here to see what the original Charterhouse Group website looked like in 2000

CHG 2003 Click here to see what the second Charterhouse Group website looked like in 2003

2005-present TC-OF.org.uk : The Therapeutic Community Open Forum began life as a joint project led by Ian Milne,  and was a partnership with PETT, the Association of Therapeutic Communities, the Community of Communities, the European Federation of Therapeutic Communities and the Charterhouse Group, after ATC's original, pioneering email discussion list was wound up by its owner/manager Chris Evans in December 2004 and a new one initiated by Ian Milne. The aim of expanding the TC-OF email discussion list to include a website and other Internet-based tools, which PETT has helped to develop and maintain, was to explore  the Internet's full potential as an intersection of people, places and organisations concerned with therapeutic community.

Email lists created, owned and moderated by PETT

Email groups which flourished before 2005

jointnewsletter: set up for the editors of the Joint Newsletter.

ohf-online : created for the "Celebrating Memory" project of the Society of Archivists' Film and Sound Group.

tceu : "Therapeutic Community European Union": Set up to be a Europe-wide communications vehicle for persons concerned with therapeutic community, specifically with EU-oriented collaborations in mind.

pett: set up by the Archive and Study Centre in 1999 to communicate about archival and historical matters related to therapeutic community work with children and young people.

re_cbeedell: Set up to facilitate the organisatio of a conference devoted to Chris Beedell

1998-2005 Society of Archivists Film and Sound Group Committee

1999-2005 Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group

1999-2005 The Association of Therapeutic Communites' Trustee Group

1999-2005 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

2000-2005 The Editorial Group for Therapeutic Communities, published by the Association of Therapeutic Communities

2002-2005  Editorial group for proposed special issue of the ATC journal to be dedicated to therapeutic community in North America

2002-2005 Charterhouse Group Education Directors and Managers Group

2002-2005 Charterhouse Group Finance and Administration Directors and Managers Group

2002-2005 Charterhouse Group Training Directors and Managers Grou

2002-2005 The Research Group of the Association of Therapeutic Communities

2003-2005 This email group grew out of the "ATC-in-24" conference hosted by the Archive and Study Centre in 2003 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Association of Therapeutic Communities. In the wake of discussion at the Conference, the group was set up to facilitate reform of the Constitution of the ATC.

2003-2005 The Association of Therapeutic CommunitiesTraining Group

2003-2005 For Trustees of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust

2004-2005 A Charterhouse Group Special Interest Group

Founding Co-Moderator

2004-present. A group created by Ian Milne to carry forward the work of the original ATC email discussion list created by Chris Evans.

PETT: Pioneer of new technology for therapeutic community

The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre website went live in 1997, hosted on a locally-based Data Network/Internet Service Provider called Epinet, a company which, sadly, has long since imploded. Setting that first website up and acquiring an account required a journey up to Epinet itself, situated on a farm in the Cotswold village of Whittington, high above Cheltenham. To connect to the Internet then required a visit from an Epinet technician, and the learning of some programming skills. If anything went wrong, it meant a trip up to Whittington with the computer, with a friendly tour of the banks of servers downstairs thrown in while the problem was sorted.

Memory was still precious, and therefore, in the first discussion with the Epinet sales team, we pared the domain name down to bare essentials. The archivist's report to the Trust in February 1997 explained:

The address chosen for the site - "pettarchiv.org.uk" - is intended to be memorable, unique, and appropriate; and to suggest our professional and permanent nature (the address is that of a `virtual server', that is, we will appear to Internet users to be our own server), our international interest, the open and unfinished nature of the project, and the "Planned Environment Therapy Trust/ Archiv/e and Study Centre" as a whole.

By today's standards the hosting was immensely expensive; but by the same token there were no limits - on service, on bandwidth, on storage, or on what you could do with the space if you knew how to do it. Taking advantage of the resource and the experience which quickly built up, the Trust adopted the policy of encouraging and acting as midwife to the take up of Internet facilities by related organisations in the therapeutic community field. The websites of the Association of Therapeutic Communities, The Cassel Hospital, and the Charterhouse Group of Therapeutic Communities all began as folders on pettarchiv.org.uk. They were created, developed, and in some instances financed from the budget of the Archive and Study Centre; and when the organisations themselves were ready, domain names were purchased and the sites were handed over.

In a similar way the Archive and Study Centre explored the new world of email listservs, settling on the facility offered by egroups (later bought up and absorbed into the newer yahoogroups); and on the basis of its own experience began promoting and creating email discussion groups as a tool for developing communication within the field.

It also consistently reached outside the therapeutic community field to add value to the wider society where it could. Among the earliest archive websites in Britain - predating the website of the Society of Archivists itself - pettarchiv.org.uk played host to the website of the Film and Sound Group of the Society of Archivists; and created and moderated email discussion groups for the Film and Sound Group, the Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group (CHARM), and the Oral History Society Regional Network.

Financial cutbacks in 2005, when staffing and resource levels in the Archive were dramatically reduced, led to the handover or closure of most of the websites and email groups the Trust had established and maintained. The experience and expertise developed, however, led to collaborations with others, leading to the Therapeutic Community Open Forum website and RadioTC International, the Institute for the History and Work of Therapeutic Environments, and the Child Care History Network.