This paper investigates the practices of organising face-to-face events of a volunteer-run food-sharing community in Denmark. The ethnographic fieldwork draws attention to the core values underlying the ways sharing events are organised, and how - through the work of volunteers - surplus food is transformed from a commodity to a gift. The findings illustrate the community’s activist agenda of food waste reduction, along with the volunteers’ concerns and practical labour of running events and organising the flow of attendees through various queuing mechanisms. The paper contributes to the area of Food and HCI by: i) outlining the role of queuing in organising activism and ii) reflecting on the role that values, such as collective care and commons, can play in structuring queuing at face-to-face events.

This paper addresses the sociotechnical challenges of organising queuing at large scale, face-to-face, food-sharing events. The authors have partnered with a grassroots food-sharing community, FoodSharing Copenhagen (FS-CPH), to reconsider queuing practices at food-sharing events. The results present three “queuing canvases” that illustrate how FS-CPH members envision digitally mediated queuing at food-sharing events. The paper outlines three themes that emerge from this design work: communicating activism through queuing, encountering others through queuing, and transparency in queuing mechanisms. We discuss how the envisioned ideas illustrate novel perspectives on queuing in volunteer-driven settings, while sometimes falling back on accepted norms and common expectations of how queuing should work. To address this, we present a set of sensitivities, for designers and activists alike, to design for queuing in settings where non-monetary sharing is central.

Sustainable HCI and Human-Food-Interaction research have developed an interest in preventing food waste through food sharing. Sustainability requires attention to both the opportunities and challenges associated with the building of food-sharing groups engaged in the redistribution of food but also in developing a wider agenda which includes, for instance, the local production of food resources. In this paper, we argue for a better understanding of the different conceptions of ‘fairness’ which inform volunteer and guest practice and in turn mediate community-building efforts. We examine the practices surrounding ‘SharingEvent’ and challenges faced to sustainability by the heterogenous, and sometimes contested, commitments of the people involved. We further consider how ICT provided opportunities for explicit examination of ideological differences concerning what ‘sharing’ might mean. Our findings show that community building is dependent on the negotiation of different values and purposes identified. We derive recommendations for action-oriented researchers ultimately concerned with systemic transformation.

This paper illustrates the work of creating, infrastructuring, and organising a food-sharing community from the ground up. Drawing on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and a three-year engagement with FoodSharing Stockholm, the paper shows how the processes of starting up a grassroots initiative are shaped by participants’ direct experience and knowledge of similar initiatives. The analysis draws attention to: (1) how central activities such as recruiting volunteers, choosing digital tools, and establishing partnerships with food donors are conceived and organised, (2) the concrete challenges of sharing surplus food, such as adopting a distribution model and negotiating fairness, and (3) how governance and decision-making models are adopted and (re)negotiated over time. The paper introduces the term Collective histories of organising to capture the impact that learning from previous experiences can have on communities' efforts to set up and run. Moreover, it re-orients design visions towards the consideration and adoption of existing sociotechnical practices, rather than always aiming at novel digital explorations. We outline three emerging dimensions that characterise “Collective histories of organising” as a concept, (1) configuring capacities, (2) configuring sociotechnical practices, and (3) configuring participation. The paper contributes practical sensitivities, for both designers and other food-sharing communities, to build, sustain, and infrastructure surplus food-sharing initiatives.