Action Science Approach to Experimenting Nonprofit Web 2.0 Services for Employment of Individuals with Mental Impairments

Introduction
This research is interested in applying Web2.0 to employment services for people with mental disabilities. Web2.0 gives Internet users a chance to easily publish their work on the Web and introduce it to the world. In this paper, we study the processes how to unleash the power of Web2.0 to assist people with mental disabilities and their caregivers.

Methodology
Action research is an established research method in use in the social and medical sciences since the mid-twentieth century. The method produces highly relevant research results, because it is grounded in practical action, aimed at solving an immediate problem situation while carefully informing theory. Action researchers are among those who assume that complex social systems cannot be reduced for meaningful study. They believe that human organizations, as a context that interacts with information technologies, can only be understood as whole entities.

WEB 2.0 Solutions
We built a Web 2.0 based architecture for nonprofit organizations (Fig.1). It includes: (1) multimedia database, (2) discussion forum, (3) introduction website, and (4) anywhere portal. In the domain we study, mission-specific database is employment service database. Multimedia database gives the caregivers a space to manage all kinds of information about the mentally disabled persons. The data is kept in private with technology such as identity management, end-to-end encryption, public key infrastructure. A discussion forum platform enables the caregivers to share knowledge and feelings which extend connections to other caregivers. The introduction website is aimed to extend the public relations to the people who may care the organization. The main components are aggregated with an “anywhere portal.”

Conclusions
We used the technology of Web2.0 in an employment services system for individuals with mental impairments to make their organizational operation more efficient, which we call Nonprofit 2.0. In the beginning, we devoted ourselves in the way of thinking how a job coach accomplishes her helping tasks.
Guided by principles of action science in 4 months of organized participant observations, in-depth interviews, field work, and focus group studies, a working prototype has been built and tested by the job coaches with significant success.