A shout out to SMRF collaborators Eric Gleave, Howard (“Ted”) Welser, and Tom Lento – our paper “A conceptual and operational definition of “Social Role” in Online Community” got the best paper award at HICSS-42! The Hawaii International Conference of System Sciences has featured a great series of mini tracks over the years. The Persistent Conversations mini track has featured great work on threaded conversations, blogs, chats, wikis, and social media for more than a decade. This year our paper appeared in the Digital Media: Content and Communication Track.

With a very nice letter that puts the award in some context:

Ten papers out of 515 at the conference were selected for Best Paper Awards. Many thanks to track organizers Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda Viegas.
A previous paper in 2006 also got best paper: You Are Who You Talk To: Detecting Roles in Usenet Newsgroups, by Danyel Fisher, Marc Smith, and Howard T. Welser
Two years before that in 2004 Fernanda Viegas and I also published a paper at HICSS that got best paper: Newsgroup Crowds and AuthorLines: Visualizing the Activity of Individuals in Conversational Cyberspaces,
by Ferndanda B. Viégas and Marc Smith.
Tom Erickson maintains a great listing of many years of HICSS papers.
Here is Tom Lento receiving the award at the conference in Hawaii earlier this month:

More Best Papers from this year…