Pervasive Communities in the Internet of People

The Internet has traditionally been a device-oriented architecture where devices with IP addresses are first-class citizens, able to serve and consume content or services, and their owners take part in the interaction only through those devices. The Internet of People (IoP) is a recent paradigm where devices become proxies of their users, and can act on their behalf. To realize IoP, new policies and rules for how devices can take actions are required. The role of context information grows as devices act autonomously based on the environment and existing social relationships between their owners. In addition, the social profiles of device owners determine e.g. how altruistic or resource-conserving they are in collaborative computing scenarios. In this paper we focus on community formation in IoP, a prerequisite for enabling collaborative scenarios, and discuss main challenges and propose potential solutions.