Note by Craig Fees:
In June, 2019, just before he died, Dennie Briggs asked me to take responsibility for his website. It had been part of the digital/virtual estate which the Mulberry Bush Organisation inherited from the Planned Environment Therapy Trust when the latter transferred its assets to the Mulberry Bush at the end of 2018 (see here).
The digital/virtual estate, managed by the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, included a number of websites. In response to a query from Pat Mitchell of the Wennington Association before the handover, she was assured by the Mulberry Bush person responsible for the website side of things that these sites would be maintained as they had been by PETT. There was a change of mind during the course of 2019, however, and Dennie's two week notice to do something about his website before it was taken down came when he was in hospital. Hence his frantic communication with me when he came out. After some quick communication, the Mulberry Bush relinquished Dennie's website into my care.
It was not in good shape.
Dennie's websites were a project that our friend and colleague Ian Milne had taken on with enthusiasm back in 2009/2010. Websites, plural, because Ian was an immensely creative and innovative person, excited by the medium of the Web, and driven by a respect for Dennie which went back to shared time at the Henderson Hospital, where Ian had been a nurse. As I noted in the Planned Environment Therapy Trust's eNewsletter 31 in January 2018:
"...he pushed the boundaries again with "The Dennie Briggs Living Digital Archive", a co-production, through more conventional website technology, to bring the documents and writings of therapeutic community pioneer Dennie Briggs into their widest possible accessibility.."
I went on:
"Not satisfied with the limitations of The Living Digital Archive, Ian continued to experiment with new ways to bring a living conversation with Dennie into being, ultimately moving from Joomla to WordPress, by way of dedicated chat rooms and conversation tools, to create a living blog at denniebriggs.com which he and Dennie actively cultivated. [But] We began to realise something was wrong when the site went down in late 2017, and the always-responsive Ian - the turn-to person when anything on the Web went wrong, PETT or otherwise - didn't respond."
We learned just before Christmas that Ian had died some time before, and the hosting for Dennie's site had lapsed.
As part of this website I will ultimately trace the history of the websites Ian created, and the task of re-creation which I then began during the course of 2018 as part of my role as archivist for the Planned Environment Therapy Trust. But of that period and after: With the imminence of the hand-over of the Archive to the Mulberry Bush Organisation it was a difficult and complex time, during which much was not done that I ought to have done for the site before hand-over. Between the hand-over itself and the notice to Dennie there was, as far as I am aware, little if any management of the site.
In any event it was in an even more complex state and what you see here is part of a long road of recovering and untangling since June 2019, through changes of hostings, Content Management Systems and domain names, wresting the site from its traces.
The work is by no means complete. Do explore, but be aware that this site is a working in-progress site.