Towards a social governance framework for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) infuses computing intelligence into the physical world. This introduces new problems in areas such as safety and security of physical properties and privacy of the people inhabiting the spaces surrounded by the things. Because IoT can be deployed in public, private, and corporate spaces, formulating and enforcing the policies to manage the actions of the things such that user data and physical properties are safeguarded are major challenges. This paper proposes a novel framework called Social Governance for evolving the policies and enforcing them in typical IoT scenarios. The key idea of Social Governance is that a device should participate in a collaborative protocol to setup the policies that govern the space that it is using. The device would have incentives to adhere to the policies that are formulated by the collaborative process. The goal of the framework is to create agile but stable governance that is context and time sensitive.