## 4 An Ecosystem as a Framework for an Open Government Research Agenda
### Users Interests, Expectations and Capabilities
#### 4.3.2 Uses, Usability and Context  
As new capabilities to answer questions about what data to use are developed and answers begin to emerge, we move somewhat fluidly to questions about how users _qua_ consumers use such information and the environments in which it is used. Government has been in the business of disseminating information electronically for quite some time. But there are enormous differences in the skills and capacity required to design static web pages and those needed to create applications that enable and empower decision-making.  
Workshop participants generated questions about how users search, where users go to find government data, and how government can collect data about its own website use that can be used to improve services and help to foster engagement with the public. Such questions are common in the fields of human-computer interaction and information science and focus squarely on generic issues of website, or application design, usability, and information seeking. Clearly, we need answers to questions that more specifically focus on how users interact with and use government information in the context of government sponsored or enabled tools or applications. How does government acquire the answers to such questions? Here workshop participants pointed ecosystem managers to the researchers, both academic and commercial, who are specialists in this area and suggested that, together, they cultivate a sub-specialty devoted to the government information context.  
Questions about what data and information users want and the environments in which it is best provided and used can only be answered when governments find ways to interact with and engage members of their target audiences in the process of developing answers. Clearly, open government implies two-way, dialogical processes in which discussions between government employees and members of target audiences, however structured, take place. At the 2012 International Conference for Digital Government Research, we were pleased to hear that representatives of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the General Services Administration (GSA) began recently to engage in such ventures. Particularly notable for our purpose were EPA's efforts to ask users what kinds of environmental information applications they would like to see developed. In another \"public dialogue\" EPA used IdeaScale to gather ideas about how to improve Data.gov. The CFPB asked members of the public for feedback about forms they would soon be deploying as part of the process of housing related disclosures. The GSA has solicited feedback from government managers, mobile experts, and the general public about what kinds of mobile government applications would be seen as desirable. And they initiated their own public dialogue about how to improve federal websites.  
These examples are illustrative for the topics they have addressed, of course, but also for the particular set of methods and electronic resources used to structure each dialogue [65, 66]. Clearly, there is much to learn about how to design, implement, and gather information from the public dialogues and other audience-oriented research that is deemed useful in open government projects. From an ecosystem perspective, one consideration raises above all these and it is a strategic one. Government can create the applications that render its data useful, or it can be in the business of seeding such creations within developer communities. Either way, government organizations, according to workshop participants, need new tools and techniques to get further into the business of understanding their audiences.