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.

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.
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• 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

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:
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• 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.

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.