Project Overview

ARTICONF addresses trust, time-criticality and democratisation for a new generation of federated infrastructure, to fulfil the privacy, robustness, and autonomy-related promises that proprietary social media platforms have failed to deliver so far.

Vialog's use case explored applications of blockchain technologies with tamperproof video lifecycle events and gamified reward mechanisms while promoting open democratic Video Opinion Discussions.

Problem and Context

The digital trust in communities is broken and needs to be re-established on platforms that communities fully own: starting with their websites. It has become increasingly challenging for communities to connect in meaningful, safe and engaging discussions.

Community Managers lost direct access to their communities because of intermediary, heavily centralised social media networks. Communities tend to be reliant and dependent on centralised social media platforms and whose business model is driven by selling the personal data of its user to different advertisers. Non-transparent algorithms are harming the rights of communities and the long-term objectives of the Community Managers.

Building on widely spread research concepts such as “Global Village”, “Public Sphere” and “Network Society”, Vialog is developing avideo commenting technology that enables citizens to create shareable and searchable video comments easily.

Video is the new frontier in engagement and provides a better alternative compared to written formats. Video reviews provide the tone of the creator and speed in creation compared to the written comments, and have many human elements related to viewer trust. Recording one’s video results in more credibility and accountability over their words by the power of human tone and warmth. Creating content with a name and face attached can be a stand up against the fake news phenomena. Fake bots and malicious trolls cannot do videos.

Value proposition

Community Managers and website owners can transform their sites into hyper‐relevant micro-social networks and engage their visitors in trusted discussions.

Vialog's mission is to inspire conversations on community webpages and enhance the role of prosumers by turning passive visitors into active contributors. The use case is developing an embeddable tool that operates on any website enabling Video Opinion Creators to record short video opinions from any device and web browser. It operates with the lowest-participation-threshold policy which means that there is no software required from anyone to participate.

  • Ability of public video discussions in a time zone‐proof asynchronous format
  • Many‐to‐many communication to its clients with added value, in contrast to most competitors' one‐to‐many communication models
  • Integrated ARTICONF tools, powering tamper-proof video lifecycle events, topic‐modelling and other deep insight extraction, in contrast to templates and filter libraries provided by competitors
  • Blockchain recorded user actions and transactions, able to offer financial or gamified rewards to video creators in a transparent and accountable manner, based on community needs

Market Perspective

By giving faces to the voices of Pilot partner organisations, the use case team is reducing the amount of cyberbullying and trolling, while shifting the virtual conversations to a more meaningful spectrum.

The wider societal implications are in line with the goals of improving justice, equality and diversity in social media networks. With the ARTICONF project's help, unheard voices can practise freedom of speech in temporal or hyper-local social networks.

The Vialog platform has a zero-tolerance policy for bullies, executed with machine-assisted community technologies and further advanced by ARTICONF to develop and maintain a safe and supportive platform of interaction.

By allowing swift creation of video opinion discussions, innovation will come in three layers:

  • Inclusivity. Timezone-proof, async updates to thematic discussions instead of one-off published or real-time news. Short, easy-to-create and highly shareable format.
  • Trust. As each video opinion is connected to a face and a name, videos increase the level of responsibility and re-establish trust.
  • Diversity. The characteristics of contribution also modify the circle of creators. Professionals and citizens can easily interact while the use case preserves the editor or curator's role with the Community Managers.

Stakeholders

The video opinion discussion use case identifies three end‐user roles:

  • Community Managers (CM) can integrate video opinion discussions on their website in 5 minutes to grow their community, sales and engagement by co‐creating financial value with their community.
    With use case technology, the CMs enable visitors to generate unique social video content and transform their sites into hyper-relevant micro social networks that increase all website KPIs: unique website visitors, sessions and session durations.
    Only videos approved by Community Managers are published. Community Managers are responsible for ensuring that videos align with the technology's Terms of Service and are relevant to the given video opinion discussion. They can review the videos submitted by video opinion creators to their discussions on the Dashboard and decide to publish, hide or delete them. They can add new video opinion discussions and get email alerts for new video submissions. CMs receive technical support with personal assistance from the use case team.
  • Video Opinion Creators can submit their opinions, questions and insights in short video messages on websites that are enabled with the technology. Video opinion creators are active prosumers who respond to CM-specified call‐to‐actions on websites.They can use any device with a camera and internet to record short (up to one minute) videos in any thematic opinion discussion thread provided by CMs. They can submit a new video to the video opinion discussions or reply to an existing video opinion. Creators can replay and redo their videos before submitting them for CM moderation and can receive a notification email when their video receives a response.
  • Video Opinion Viewers view video opinions on websites enabled with use case technology. They can use any device and any browser to play back videos and listen to the video opinion creators. They can report inappropriate content for CMs' review by flagging any video. The use case considers it a design and product challenge to enable and incentivise video opinion viewers to become Video Opinion Creators themselves. They can share video opinion discussions or decide to follow them.

Research Outcomes

Contributed to the development of four open-source tools. Vialog was the leader of Work Package “Dissemination and Exploitation” and provided the "Video Opinion Discussion" use case.

Open-source tools

TIC →

A Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) reduces the complexities of setting up a federated decentralized ecosystem, making its deployment simple, configurable, dynamic and easy.

SMART →

Provides a semantic contextualisation, abstraction and democratic-decision making framework capable of finding and building socially-entrusted interest group communities.

CONF →

For planning cost-effective distributed cloud infrastructures for a decentralized application, automating the service deployment and configuration, monitoring and adapting the runtime system to ensure the business value.

TAC →

Embraces the development of techniques that improve efficiency and inject intelligent insights into operational and mission-critical social media businesses through guided visualytics.

Use case

During the project the team built the use case tool from scratch to empower communities on their website, as opposed to the centralised social media platforms, providing more control, authenticity and trust over the whole lifecycle of video opinion discussions than any alternative could provide.

In the project, Vialog completed hundreds of Trello tickets (iterative product development), generated thousands of unique social videos (solid pilots), stored tens of thousands of video moderation events on ARTICONF’S TIC tool (integrated production environment) and served millions of video discussion loads (proven technical scalability).

For the video opinion discussion use case, the team used the Lean Startup methodology:

→ Gather real‐life requirements directly using stakeholder interviews → Turn them into product roadmap  → Conduct pilot → Collect and disseminate best practices of successful campaigns → Educate future pilot partners to empower more communities → (repeat)

Black Nights, an A-list film festival with 80,000 attendees used Vialog's video opinion discussion use case. It opened a new form of a dialogue between filmmakers and the audience.

Dissemination

Vialog was the leader of Work Package “Dissemination and exploitation” which achieved an outstanding impact:

  • Reached five times more website visitors than the objective;
  • Met four times more stakeholders (Decentralised APP [DAPP] Developers and DAPP Explorers);
  • Published two times the papers and five times the articles;
  • Collaborated with two times more EU projects then promised in the original grant proposal.


The project reached 27K people and reported all 200+ activities for transparency and iterative learning purposes.

Vialog led ARTICONF in organising three Expert’s Vision Chats, a Datathon, and in creating four Knowledge Basis, 32 blog posts and 1200+ tweets.

Take a look at the consortium and use case videos.

Browse the dissemination and exploitaiton database to see action by action how Vialog and its partners achieved this success.

Vialog's project partners in the ARTICONF project:
Universität Klagenfurt
Universiteit van Amsterdam
The University of Edinburgh
University for Information Science and Technology "St. Paul the Apostle"
MOG Technologies
Agilia Center
bitYoga

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825134, the ARTICONF Project.

Links and contacts


Project website →

Get in touch with the Vialog team or with ARTICONF project coordinator Radu Prodan radu@articonf.eu and scientific coordinator Nishant Saurabh nishant@articonf.eu to discuss the project and collaborate.

For more information about the ARTICONF video opinion discussion use case, visit the links below or contact support@vialog.io

EC portal: results page for the use case →

ARTICONF: Results page  →

ARTICONF: Video Opinion Discussion use case →

Blog: The pandemic opened the door for video opinion discussions →

Blog: Vialog for education and product improvements →

The following deliverables were used to create this page: D2.1, D2.3, D7.2, D7.3, D8.3, D8.4, D8.6, D8.7

Why partner with Vialog?

Schedule a Meeting

Meet the team and exchange insights and research agenda. No commitment.

Expert Proposal Contributions

Vialog brings an experienced team to writing and proofreading grant proposals and scientific deliverables to enhance the competitiveness of your consortium. For Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) and Innovation Actions (IA) projects, we offer next generation ideation and the finest quality assurance.

Multi-Disciplinary Execution

As a multi-disciplinary startup, Vialog provides real-world execution capabilities for your consortium's strategy. Our diverse skill set means we are flexible and adaptive, able to pivot according to research needs and stakeholder feedback. This ensures your project doesn’t stuck inside deliverables but thrives in real-world applications.

High-Impact Science Communication

Build on top of Vialog’s proven methods for interactive and engaging science communication. We collaborate with editors to commission reports and interviews on top science portals. By working with stakeholders throughout your projects, we help you stay relevant and maximize impact, ultimately increasing the reach and conversion rates of your science communication efforts.

Accelerated Stakeholder Engagement

Utilize Vialog’s innovative video technologies to supercharge your stakeholder communities. Our tools have led to a 12X increase in unique website visitors of research projects to convert viewers into content creators. Research projects that use Vialog for dissemination and engagement can report significantly higher stakeholder involvement and evergreen video content.

Language & Device Inclusivity

Vialog designs and develops technologies for universal accessibility. By lowering thresholds of participation our technology works on any device and offers language support for dozens of languages. This inclusivity allows for a more diverse stakeholder engagement, reaching communities that otherwise overlooked, but vital for comprehensive research.

Increase your stakeholder engagement