While digital divides persist both within and across territories, internet penetration and the use of personal computers and smartphones have increased dramatically in many urban areas around the globe (Graham, 2011; ITU, 2017). Such technologies are increasingly integrated into the fabric of urban residents’ everyday lives, so it is unsurprising that they are also being adopted and adapted by food-sharing initiatives, from crowd-mapping sources of publicly available wild urban foods, such as Ripe Near.Me (Edwards and Davies, 2018), to the algorithmic architecture of apps that help to connect retailers with surplus food to community groups who are looking to provide a food service within their activities (Midgely, 2018; Weymes and Davies, 2018b). This chapter examines how these new technologies facilitate and shape both familiar and novel forms of exchange through sharing and explores the resulting connections between sharers. While ICT mediation (and intermediation) is enabling unparalleled interactions between strangers around food sharing, in terms both of the rapidity and number of exchanges and of their territorial reach, the impacts of these remain underdetermined. Drawing on case studies of initiatives from contrasting urban settings, this chapter explores the diverse ways in which ICT is helping to construct new sites, moments and experiences of food sharing.

Outlining a landscape-level analysis of ICT-mediation across the database initiatives, this chapter also presents a deeper dive into the ways in which ICT is being used by food-sharing initiatives. It focuses first on a number of initiatives that have integrated more complex forms of ICT such as websites, interactive platforms and apps into their activities, as it is the functionality of these tools that has been touted as holding the most transformative potential for sharing activities and that has gleaned the most media attention. Examples are drawn from contrasting initiatives that provide the technological means to map excess urban harvests and those that utilise complex ICT to provide opportunities to eat together with others. The third section focuses on surplus food redistribution, which has seen considerable attention from policy actors concerned with food waste and activists concerned with ongoing food insecurity. It presents a critical analysis of the disruptive potential of such ICT-mediated surplus food sharers, particularly drawing on the experiences of an initiative established in Dublin that has scaled internationally.