The use of social technologies as a tool for decoding information and disseminating it is an element of educational transformation, especially with regard to popular education. This is one of the fields of activity of Associação Raízes, which is responsible for running the Núcleo de Educação Ambiental da Bacia de Campos (NEA-BC) project. The institution is a third sector organization that has been operating in the Campos Basin region since 2008 and aims to promote and manage projects that contribute to the development of communities in search of a fair and sustainable society. In implementing NEA-BC, the institution encourages citizen participation in the municipalities of Saquarema, Araruama, Arraial do Cabo, Cabo Frio, Armação dos Búzios, Casimiro de Abreu, Rio das Ostras, Macaé, Carapebus, Quissamã, Campos dos Goytacazes, São João da Barra, São Francisco de Itabapoana, Presidente Kennedy, Marataízes, Itapemirim and Piúma, in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo, Brazil. To this end, the project develops training activities with the participating community members, anchored in popular education and the assumptions of critical environmental education, which, among other actions, develop social technologies for decoding information from municipal public budgets, associated with educommunication strategies.

Public budgets are instruments for managing public policies, implemented by the government, and social involvement and participation in their preparation and monitoring are essential if the public policies developed are to meet the demands of the population. However, their technical content and difficulty of access are obstacles to participation. Through the project, Associação Raízes developed Explora, a social research tool that disseminates municipal budget data. Community members analyze public spending and synthesize the main information so that it can be published on the platform. By processing technical information, decoding it and promoting its dissemination, the technology uses communication tools as an educational strategy. This relationship between communication and education is presented to us by Freire (1977), in his book “Extension or Communication?” and opens the way for this discussion in different areas, including social projects that have appropriated this form of communication (sometimes also called educommunication) with the aim of transforming the reality of community groups, with “the central proposal of promoting information and the intellectual growth of the person, by contributing to the self-emancipation of each one through collective and mobilizing action” (PERUZZO. 2017).

The region where the project operates is historically characterized by coronelism and patrimonialism, barriers to social participation, both in terms of access to public spheres and in terms of citizenship. The use of education and the development of social technologies associated with educommunicative practices encourages debate, reflection and intervention in everyday life, allowing citizens to be able to “create their own symbolic and imaginary universe and their own definitions of life” (SOARES, 2004).

Thus, the NEA-BC project aims to contribute to the process of democratizing information in civil society and facilitating the process of social participation, considering the process of dialogic communication, defended by Paulo Freire, who presents it as the link between dialogue and social participation.

Keywords: Environmental education, Social technologies, Educommunication.