I was greatly inspired by the book Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim back in 2002, before Facebook was launched. Through reading this book, I became convinced of the power of web communities for helping tackle social issues. My vision was to build a Wired In virtual meeting place for peers to communicate with, and help, each other. A place where ideas could be developed and exchanged, and stories told.
However, I was never able to raise the funding required to develop such a web community. After taking early retirement from my Professorial position in the Department of Psychology, University of Swansea in late-2006, I made the decision to use some of my redundancy payment to finance the development of a web community focused on addiction recovery, which we would call Wired In To Recovery