Comunità di pratiche, posta elettronica e generi comunicativi

The research examined the three years communication exchanged by an inter-organizational community of software developers conducted primarily through electronic mail (800 e-mail messages in total), using both the notions of communicative genre and of genre repertoire. Results show that the genre repertoire of the community is composed by five genres and the most present was the informal genre of Note: this result show that the community organized his communicative interactions mainly as an informal exchanges between peers, than as the formal structure of an inter-organizational project. The change along time project of the genre repertoire show its relationships with both specific work activities and with the phase of development of the community itself: this result is showing as informality is a dimension co-constructed by member during their interactions. Moreover the qualitative analysis of the messages describe both the progressive growing of relationships between community’ s members and those communicative aspects depending strictly from the usage of a system of electronic mail.