PeerFlow: Peer-to-Peer Electronic Institutions

Our aim is for electronic institutions to become a pervasive mechanism to coordinate very large networks of humans and devices, and thus a centralised approach carries numerous challenges for the future. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks appear to be a natural option to implement distributed electronic institutions as they provide a number of desirable properties: they are robust, they scale well and nodes are equally privileged. In the last decade many applications and technologies have been built using P2P networks, such as file sharing, distributed storage or even web search engines. This chapter proposes a P2P implementation of electronic institutions called PeerFlow and a GUI that allows for the automatic generation of user interfaces over web browsers.