The Mediated Conversation HICSS minitrack is home for research on the interface of conversation and technology. Conversations are at the heart of every human activity. Mediated conversations that use text, audio, images and video are a part of every aspect of life: From the Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations”, through Robin Dunbar’s conversations as devices for social grooming. Accordingly, this minitrack is open to research on mediated conversation from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including Communication, Management, Education, Computer Science, Sociology, Political Science, Psychology, Linguistics, Law, and the like. As the role of mediated conversation in everyday life and in the workplace becomes more dominant, we encounter new research questions. Many mediated conversations leave a persistent record and become persistent conversations. This persistence transforms the essence of conversation that was, until recently, predominantly volatile and ephemeral. On the other hand, some forms of mediated conversation are deliberately ephemeral and impermanent, as demonstrated by media such as Snapchat. This 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. Since then, the mediation of human communication has been imposing a new set of challenges. For example, what are the mechanisms that perform the role of the ephemeral social cues of face-to-face conversation? What are the consequences of the creation of potentially permanent records in terms of privacy, accountability, and the right to be forgotten? What of the ability to erase, steal, hijack and selectively leak and disseminate conversations that were meant to remain under the control of their participants? How do platforms affect or mediate conversations, for example by imposing algorithmic biases? Can we evaluate the claims about loss of intimacy, depth, and quality of human communication when carried out digitally? This minitrack brings together researchers and innovators to explore mediated conversation and its implications for learning, commercial transactions, entertainment, news, politics, and other forms of human interaction; to raise new socio-technical, ethical, pedagogical, linguistic and social questions; and to suggest new methods, perspectives, and design approaches. Examples of appropriate topics include, but are not limited to: * Innovation in digital conversational practice: turn-taking, threading, and other structural features of CMC * The dynamics and analysis of large scale conversation systems (e.g., MOOCs and big data applications) * Methods for analyzing mediated conversation * Studies of virtual communities or other sites of digital conversation * 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, and visual cues * The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions * Novel properties of mediated conversation * Social presence and the mediation of an attributed user’s identity * The platform's role in mediating the conversation The submission site is: https://confs.precisionconference.com/~hicss/ *Submission deadline: June 15, 2017, 11:59 pm HST* For questions, please contact one of the co-chairs *Minitrack Co-Chairs:* *Sheizaf Rafaeli* (Primary Contact) University of Haifa sheizaf@rafaeli.net *Yoram M Kalman* The Open University of Israel yoramka@openu.ac.il *Carmel Kent* University of Exeter, UK kent.carmel@gmail.com Since 1968, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) has been known worldwide as the longest-standing working scientific conferences in Information Technology Management. HICSS provides a highly interactive working environment for top scholars from academia and the industry from over 60 countries to exchange ideas in various areas of information, computer, and system sciences. Recent research shows HICSS ranked second in citation ranking among 18 Information Systems (IS) conferences, ranked third in value to the MIS field among 13 Management Information Systems (MIS) conferences, and ranked second in conference rating among 11 IS conferences. As of May 2017, papers from the most recent HICSS conference have been downloaded 100,547 times by readers from more than 130 countries. Also, about 5,000 downloads of HICSS-50 papers were recorded in the AIS e-library. For more details see http://hicss.hawaii.edu/about/ -- Yoram Kalman, PhD Cell: +972 54 574 7375 www.kalmans.com