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Think globally, act locally: a case study of a free food sharing community and social networking

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Social networking has a long history of supporting communities online. In this paper we are concerned with a specific community that has formed around free food sharing to save food from being wasted. Specifically, Foodsharing.de is a platform that enables consumers, farmers, organizations and retailers to offer and collect food. Associated with this is the Foodsharing Facebook group where broader community discussions take place. We report on a qualitative analysis of the Foodsharing Facebook group to understand its role in emerging and sustaining the community. The Facebook group is a place where the individual values and motives, socio-political discussions and mass media interrelate and create new social patterns through narratives and local community building. We present our findings as interplay between individual, community, organisational levels, public relations and media, the operational platform Foodsharing.de that enables local communities and the Facebook group where global ideological framing of the community takes place.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 15 February 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. activism
    2. communities
    3. empowerment
    4. facebook
    5. food waste
    6. free share economy
    7. social networking sites

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    February 15 - 19, 2014
    Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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    CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)Who Gives? Non-Commercial Distribution Networks in Domestic Food Production in the Inland North of SwedenSustainability10.3390/su1606230016:6(2300)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
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