Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia

Any academic conference requires the efforts of many people, from conference committee members to reviewers to authors to attendees. I would like to thank some of the people who helped organize ACM Hypertext 2006 here. Uffe K. Wiil did an excellent job as General Chair, taking care of the lion's share of the budgeting, planning, and organizing, from the hotel selection to the day-to-day logistics. Jessica Rubart was an extremely able and effective co-Program Chair. Niels Olof Bouvin, the Technical Services Chair, worked hard to set up, customize and maintain our review system. Publicity Chair David Millard ensured that word of the conference reached many people.The reviewers this year did an excellent job. We received 41 full paper submissions, of which 12 were accepted. We also received 29 short paper submissions, of which 10 were accepted. As these acceptance rates indicate, we were unable to accept every paper we would have liked. We were particularly pleased to see a large number of papers that spoke to this year's theme of social networks and networking. This pays tribute to the breadth and flexibility of the community, something that many people note as one of the true strengths of this conference series.ACM Hypertext, as a conference series, is at a crossroads. When Uffe Wiil and I agreed to organize this year's event, we generated a quick preliminary call for papers with the headline "Quo Vadimus?" Looking at the submissions and accepted papers at this year (and, indeed the past several years) conference gives us some idea of how the Hypertext community has changed since the initial workshops of the late 1980's. Understanding this change can help us answer our question about where we are going. I hope we can use this event not only to further our understanding of the research aspects of our community, but also to plot a sustainable course for the future.