Open Data Reuse and Information Needs Satisfaction: A Method to Bridge the Gap

Data providers share open government data (OGD) to be transformed by reusers into products and services. OGD is believed to lead to many benefits but is not reaching its expected level of reuse. Data providers have attempted to use crowdsourcing contests to tackle this issue, but reusers seem to participate more for themselves than the needs of citizens. This paper presents a tentative workshop method to capture activity-based information needs of end-users in an everyday context, in order to inform publishers and inspire reusers to bridge the gap between them and end-users. The workshop is developed using design science research. It is presented as a facilitator script that can be used by practitioners, data providers, or reusers. The outputs can inform data providers about valuable datasets to release and inspire reusers to innovate sought after solutions and be adapted by open data researchers to collect data about information needs.