Communication and Expression in Social Networks: Getting the "Making Common" from People

In the context of socio-economic and cultural diversity of continental proportions lived by Brazilian citizens, the e-Cidadania project aims at the development of systems for the constitution of a digital culture among those that are not familiar with technology. One of the project´s main contributions is the Inclusive Social Network (ISN) Vila na Rede, which is being constructed based on methods and artifacts from Organizational Semiotics and on Participatory Design techniques. Within a challenging research scenario, this research is part of an ongoing work that studies the community´s natural social behaviors in order to understand how technological tools for communication and expression could make sense to less experienced users. The objective of this paper is to present the process that allowed us to understand the need of the concepts of meta-communication and transversal communication within ISNs, and that helped us to elicit requirements for the development of communication and expression tools to be used in the constitution of ISNs. As part of this process, activities involving target end users and researchers from different fields were conducted. This paper describes these activities and discusses the results extracted and analyzed in order to derive norms from which some system requirements were based.