Dear colleagues, Members of AoIR and of the Air-L listserv who research any aspect of online conversation are invited to submit papers to HICSS, the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) that will take place in the island of Maui, Hawaii in January 2019. The Mediated Conversation minitrack focuses on research of conversations taking place on digital and social media. Conversations are at the core of human communication. Mediated conversations can use text, audio, images or video, or any combination thereof. The minitrack welcomes research on conversations that are interpersonal, as well as those that occur in organizational or mass communication, educational or political contexts, and in any other sphere of human activity. Some examples of highly cited papers that first appeared in this minitrack include: Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, by Honey & Herring; Talk before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia by Viégas, Wattenberg, Kriss and van Ham; You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups by Fisher, Smith and Welser; Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter by boyd, Golder and Lotan; and, Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft by Nardi, Ly and Harris. This minitrack brings together researchers and innovators to explore mediated conversation and its implications; to raise new socio-technical, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic and social questions; and to suggest new methods, perspectives, and design approaches. The Mediated Conversation minitrack is the successor of the Persistent Conversation minitrack established by Tom Erickson and Susan Herring at HICSS in 1999, which was originally focused on the novelty of conversational persistence. With the prevalence of mediated conversation, we are called upon to consider a wider field of issues. Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to: • Innovation in mediated conversational practice • The dynamics and analysis of large scale conversation systems (e.g., MOOCs and big data applications) • Methods for analyzing mediated conversation: qualitative, quantitative, data analytics • Mediated collaboration • The dark side of mediated conversation, e.g. loafing, bullying, and communication overload • Studies of virtual communities or other sites of mediated conversation • Ethics and mediated conversation: privacy, deception, freedom of speech, security and information warfare • The role of mediated conversation in knowledge management • The role of mediated conversation in organizations • Domain specific applications, opportunities and challenges of mediated conversations and conversational exchanges (e.g., in education, healthcare, social movements, government, citizen participation) • Conversation visualization • The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions • Novel properties of mediated conversation • The platform’s role in mediating the conversation Fast track journal opportunity: Authors of papers accepted for presentation in the minitrack will be offered the opportunity to submit an extended version of their papers for consideration for fast-track publication in the ACM journal ACM Transaction on Social Computing ([1]https://tsc.acm.org/) Important Dates for Paper Submission April 15, 2018: Paper Submission System Launched June 15, 2018 | 11:59 pm HST: Paper Submission Deadline August 17, 2018: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection September 22, 2018: Deadline for Authors to Submit Final Manuscript for Publication October 1, 2018: Deadline for at least one author of each paper to register for HICSS-52 For details see [2]http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/ If you have any questions, please contact the minitrack Co-Chairs: Sheizaf Rafaeli (Primary Contact) University of Haifa [3]sheizaf@rafaeli.net Yoram M Kalman The Open University of Israel [4]yoramka@openu.ac.il Carmel Kent Arden University, UK [5]kent.carmel@gmail.com -- Yoram Kalman, PhD [6]www.kalmans.com Cell: +1 737 781 4770 References 1. https://tsc.acm.org/ 2. http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/ 3. mailto:sheizaf@rafaeli.net 4. mailto:yoramka@openu.ac.il 5. mailto:kent.carmel@gmail.com 6. http://www.kalmans.com/