Vasileios Ntouros

My research as a PhD student centres around the ‘sharing economy’, a resource-management economy where digital technologies mediate sharing practices of all sorts. In response to the critics shaped against the big and for-profit sharing economy my research focuses on non market-driven collaborative and community economy projects and the ways such projects’ members use different forms of technologies, off-the-shelf existing ones and ad hoc.

For my first case-study, I engaged with a community of which members have been appropriating Facebook to develop an impromptu, self-organised and not-profit-driven ride-sharing scheme in Greece.

Currently, and for my second case-study, adopting a participatory action research approach, I participate in a self-organised and interdisciplinary community of people who develop and manage an open-source platform called 'Karrot'; used by various initiatives around the globe. Karrot was initially developed to support foodsaving/sharing practices and is currently redeveloped to support other communities of sharers accordingly.

In the recent years I ‘ve participated in various community-driven projects for longer or shorter periods, for example the rural makerspace ‘Tzoumakers’ and the urban garden ‘Prinzessinnengarten’.

Since 2019,with the support of a few friends I started the renovation of an old rural house located in N.W. Greece, where various researchers and artists from different fields have been hosted so far, and the establishment of an adjacent permaculture garden.

I am also a keen yet very amateur skateboarder.