Fairness is a recurring challenge in grassroots digital infrastructures, where collective action depends on volunteer contributions. This paper presents a study of Foodsharing.de, a grassroots FOSS platform with 185,000 members rescuing and redistributing surplus food. Drawing on 25 interviews and long-term activist involvement, we analyze two justice-oriented features: the Cherry-Picking Rule (distributional fairness) and Commitment Statistics (contributional fairness). We show how these fairness features become deeply entangled in practice and how they operate as policy-in-code, inscribing fairness logics into software and redistributing not only food and labor but also authority within the community. Rather than settling questions of justice, these interventions trigger renewed negotiation across deliberative spaces and everyday coordination, as encoded rules are interpreted, contested, and adapted. Building on these dynamics, we outline governance directions for justice-oriented grassroots infrastructures, highlighting the need for contestability and accountable autonomy to sustain negotiation and align technical change with community legitimacy.

States increasingly weaponize digital infrastructures through censorship and surveillance. Iran represents an acute case of this broader global pattern. We study how citizens sustain connectivity and agency during Iran’s Women–Life–Freedom (WLF) protests. Based on 21 interviews with citizens and digital activists in Kermanshah province, inside Iran and in the diaspora, we document a shift from dependence on commercial circumvention to grassroots infrastructuring: people created and shared VPNs, proxies, and ad hoc communication pipelines. Peer learning on platforms such as Telegram, X, and GitHub—via Persian tutorials, scripts, and troubleshooting—enabled rapid adaptation under repression. We identify four dynamics: (1) distrust and survival as primary motivations; (2) infrastructural solidarity as everyday care; (3) technical improvisation and peer teaching; and (4) persistent constraints from censorship and risk. We argue that grassroots infrastructuring reframes end-user development as survival work. The paper contributes empirical evidence and design implications for HCI/CSCW on civic technologies, digital activism, and infrastructures of participation under authoritarian control.

Abstract Interconnected global crises have emphasized the need for alternative visions of the future, making transformative action urgent. Consequently, Sustainable Human–Computer Interaction (SHCI) has seen growing interest in exploring means to support radical and sustainable change, starting with grassroots, community-driven endeavors. This study explores the concept of Utopian Design Space (UDS) in the context of surplus redistribution in grassroots communities. The objective is to understand how practical concerns and transformative ambitions intersect, creating spaces that foster sharing and caring practices. Through action-oriented research, we examine six local projects, highlighting ICT’s role in these initiatives. Our findings highlight the challenges and opportunities in managing values, scalability, sustainability and inclusivity within UDSs. We discuss how aligning ICT with community practices can foster socio-technical innovation and support transformative change, introducing the notion of prefigurative technology. These insights can help us envisage design spaces that foster utopian ideas like equitable resource distribution and generalized reciprocity.

Abstract Grassroots initiatives promoting sharing-for-community are viewed as contributing to the transition towards a more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable world. However, along with other challenges, they often encounter technological barriers. In this article we report on our engagement with a number of self-organised foodsaving and sharing communities active in Europe which use the open-source platform Karrot to coordinate their activities. Our aim has been to explore the use of Karrot, across various contexts. We have also been interested in understanding Karrot’s impact on community-led foodsaving and sharing daily practices, as well as on community governance and organising; aspects which distinguish grassroots initiatives from more top-down anti-food waste models. We found that while Karrot facilitates certain processes, it does not fully meet the needs of the researched communities, which in turn have been configuring Karrot and have been developing unique digital ecologies, combining Karrot with off-the-shelf commercial tools. By recognising foodsaving and sharing communities as elements of a larger transformational ecosystem, we broaden our discussion to include the role of technology beyond just community-led foodsaving and sharing initiatives. Reflecting on the process of developing digital ecologies, we explore interoperability as a design element that can enhance sharing-for-community practices. Next, we propose strategies to strengthen community governance and organisation. Finally, we seed Community-Supported Software as an evolving framework that can facilitate the collaboration between grassroots place-based and software communities.

Technology plays a pivotal role in driving transformation through grassroots movements, which operate on a local scale while embracing a global perspective on sustainability. Consequently, research emerged within Sustainable HCI, aiming to derive design principles that can empower these movements to scale their impact. However, a notable gap exists in contributions when addressing scalability of large free and open-source software (FOSS) projects.

Sustainable HCI and Human-Food-Interaction research have developing 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.

Food practices have become an important context for questions around sustainability. Within HCI, sustainable HCI and human-food-interaction have developed as a response. We argue, nevertheless, that food practices as a social activity remain relatively under-examined, and further that sustainable food practices hinge on communal activity. We present the results of action-oriented research with a grassroots movement committed to sustainable food practices at a local, communal level, thereby demonstrating the role of ICT in making food resource sharing a viable practice. We suggest that the current focus on food sharing might usefully be supplemented by attention to food resource sharing, an approach that aligns with a paradigm shift from surplus to abundance. We argue for a design that aims to encourage food resource sharing at a local level but that also has wider ramifications. These “glocal” endeavors recognize the complexity of prosumption practices and foster aspirations for “deep change” in food systems.

There is a developing recognition of the social and economic costs entailed in global supply chains. In this paper, we report on efforts to provide alternative, more sustainable and resilient models of production. Community Supported Agricultures (CSAs) address this problem but require new means of exchange which, we suggest, offer a design opportunity for sustainable HCI research. This paper presents a two months participatory observation in a food movement, a German CSA which developed a distribution system involving their own currency. Based on our ethnographic observations, we focus our discussion on (1) the solidaristic principles upon which the movement is based and (2) techniques of mediating between consumers’ wishes and the constraints of local agricultural production. By relating to the continued development of CSAs, we identify three interrelated innovation gaps and discuss new software architectures aimed at resolving the problems which arise as the movement grows.

For over a decade, researchers from the practice-centered computing community are taking social practices as a unit of design. While the first generation focused on a social practice in isolation, more recent work argues for the (inter-)connections of mutually influencing practices as the primary unit of design. We discuss these current approaches to motivate the notion of a network of practices. Utilizing the case of food practices, we construct and analyze a network populated by the answers of 60 participants. Based on this network we suggest how to identify central elements and clusters as well as points for intervention within the overall network, but also within and in-between clusters of practices. Based on this, our work critically discusses how an understanding of practices as a network could improve practice-based research and design.