Social things - The SandS instantiation

Abstract

At a time when socialism as an economic option is variously questioned, very few people are against social instances of our life such as entertainment, customer assistance, and so on. This happens with the management of many things accompanying our life as well. We can find both the reason and the evidence for the viability of this trend in one very basic fact: things are social because they work better. However, also in this sphere social politics are highly questionable. Here we introduce the perspective adopted in the European project SandS within a framework of Internet of Things. In this case things are agents interacting on the network within a service centric approach where a sound hierarchy dispatches instructions. It is a complete ecosystem where the social network develops a collective intelligence subtending new concrete functionalities that are centered on the user willing and fostered by his/her feedbacks. The central role of the user reflects on all aspects of the ecosystem, from the family of things which are socially governed: the household appliances (the white goods) that affect our everyday life, up to the employed hardware and software: strictly open source.