Designing for social learning implies understanding the perspective, interests and needs of intended participants. Our goal is to design an online environment that supports a community of practice for paleontology that includes amateurs and professionals. This online space will be designed to support shared practice related to the domain of knowledge that we delimit as: understanding the natural world through the collection, preparation, curation and study of fossils and the science of paleontology. We call this practice social paleontology—an inclusive form of computer-supported collaborative scientific inquiry. This study sought to understand the expectations of citizens as intended users of such a space based upon their experiences with and conceptions of social media. The results inform the theory of social learning while building our capacity for achieving a successful design.