The objective of the P2PEOPLE project is to research & develop a P2P collaborative framework and a prototype application to allow people to form “common interest groups” and provide those group members with new ways to communicate, collaborate and make business together.  

The P2People project aims at providing a set of essential integrated services that provides to peer-2-peer users the ways to collaborate in a new business / cooperation processes: 

§         A presence service, that will provide information on which of the existing users in the P2P network are currently online

§         A profile matching service, that allow to publish user interest in the network and find other "compatible" users

§         A reputation service, that allow users to vote other user reputation and request user reputation in the network

§         A messaging (mail) service, that will allow for synchronous/asynchronous text and multimedia message exchange between users of the P2People platform

§         A chat service, that will allow users to join virtual chat rooms in which they can participate in a conference-like textual message exchange

§         A File Sharing service, that will provide file sharing functionality in the peer-to-peer network

§         A File Browsing service, that will provide the directory browser functionality in the peer-to-peer network

§         A File Transfer service, that will provide file transfer functionality in the peer-to-peer network

§         A screen sharing service, that will allow users to make visible part of their display to remote users in the peer-to-peer network

§         A screen capturing service, that will allow users to give remote control of the computer to other peer in the network

§         A voice&video communication service, that will allow real-time video transmission and videoconferencing functionality in the peer-to-peer environment.

§         A Payment service, that will allow users to perform secure micro payments in order to pay for services that other users might be offering in the peer-to-peer network  

While most innovation efforts in P2P focus on computer resources and file sharing, P2PEOPLE focus on people.  So the objective is to research a mechanism to allow users find other users to group with, based on the idea that both share a “common interest”.  

To fulfill the objectives the following problems need to be solved: 

§         Provide a  way to allow a user to publish information about his profile as a description of his interests and the way to  communicate with other users.

§         To keep that information in the local user computer rather than in central server to ensure a higher degree of privacy.

§         To offer the user enough security and provide him with tools to filter and stop non desired messages.

§         Provide the technology to create and manage all queries and negotiations between peer in a user transparent way. The system will not require the user initiative to search compatible peers, instead the system will search and negotiate peer relationships based on the rules defined in the user profile.