Dear AoIR colleagues, The Mediated Conversation minitrack focuses on the study 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, including the emerging interplay of human-machine communication. This minitrack is part of the Digital and Social Media track of HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, which will host its 54th annual conference (see HICSS-54) on January 5-8, 2021, at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. The submission site is now open. Submissions will be accepted until June 15, 2020, at 11:59 p.m. HST For details see [1]https://mediatedconversation.wordpress.com/ 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, etc. * Mediated collaboration * Mediated conversation and COVID-19 * The dark side of mediated conversation: e.g., loafing, hate speech, 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, and news media) * Conversation visualization * The role of listeners, lurkers, and silent interactions * Novel properties of mediated conversation * A platform’s role in mediating the conversation * Power dynamics and conversational patterns among users of social media * The role of conversation in understanding the interplay between media producers and media audiences * Human-machine communication and related conversations (e.g., chatbots) 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 ([2]https://tsc.acm.org/) Mediated Conversation minitrack co-chairs: Sheizaf Rafaeli (Primary Contact) University of Haifa [3]sheizaf@rafaeli.net Seth C. Lewis University of Oregon [4]sclewis@uoregon.edu Yoram Kalman The Open University of Israel [5]yoramka@openu.ac.il References 1. https://mediatedconversation.wordpress.com/ 2. https://tsc.acm.org/ 3. mailto:sheizaf@rafaeli.net 4. mailto:sclewis@uoregon.edu 5. mailto:yoramka@openu.ac.il