Project - Say Hello -- Local social networks, powered at the edge

Overview

Say Hello is the result of DIGI-HI (Digital Companion for Localised Interactions) a project within ICT-FLAME. It is an application for festival attendees for creating and locally sharing mix-media stories using the FLAME infrastructure. We consider the deployment of 5G technologies as an enabler for such kind of social networks and a unique opportunity that will divert the attention from global centralised platforms to open, private, local, ad-hoc communities.

The project successfully validated a proof of concept for ephemeral and proximity-based social networks, where participation is limited to people who are co-located and active for a specific period of time. Building on IN2’s long-standing collaboration with event organisers, the experiment addressed a clear gap in how time and location are integrated into digital social interaction at live events.

Festivals bring together diverse audiences, activities, and cultural expressions, yet participants’ digital experiences often remain fragmented and disconnected. While attendees actively capture photos and videos on their mobile devices, this content is rarely shared with others on-site, and exhibitors struggle to reach people already present at the event. Say Hello responds to this challenge by enabling hyperlocal content sharing: participants can create stories, receive real-time notifications, browse and search nearby content, and interact through comments, forming a temporary, event-specific social network. All content is automatically deleted after the event, reinforcing privacy and ephemerality while supporting personalisation, interactivity, mobility, and localisation.

A key innovation of the project was its fully edge-based deployment, with the application running directly on the street using a distributed architecture enabled by FLAME and 5G technologies. This approach demonstrated clear advantages over traditional cloud-based platforms, supporting low latency, privacy, and local autonomy. User feedback from a pilot trial in Barcelona confirmed both technical performance and user acceptance, while also highlighting future enhancements such as saving selected stories or maintaining contacts. Following the success of the experiment, IN2 plans to package Say Hello as a reusable service and deploy it at reference events, inviting early adopters to explore new forms of local, private, and community-driven digital interaction.