We discuss the Open Mind Initiative, which provides a framework for large-scale collaborative efforts in building components of "intelligent" systems that address common-sense reasoning, document and language understanding, speech and character recognition, and so on.  These areas have highly developed and adequate theory; progress is held back by lack of sufficiently large datasets of 'informal' knowledge, which can be provided by non-experts.

Based on the Open Source methodology, the Open Mind Intitiative allows domain specialists to contribute algorithms, tool developers to provide software infrastructure and tools, and non-specialists or 'e-citizens' to contribute information to large knowledge databases via the internet.  An important challenge is to make it easy and rewarding -- for instance by novel game interfaces, financial incentives, and educational interest -- for e-citizens to provide information.

We review free software and open source approaches, including their business and economic models, and past software projects of particular relevance to Open Mind.
 

We then describe some of the challenges and opportunities for computer-human interactions, particularly novel game interfaces, insuring data integrity and learning from heterogeneous contributors.[1,2]
 

[1] "Character and Document Research in the Open Mind Initiative" by David G. Stork, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR99), 1999, in press.

[2] "The Open Mind Initiative" by David G. Stork, IEEE Computer (submitted) 1999.
 

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