There is a large body of research on software services, but the issues of communication and dynamic reconfiguration have received little attention, as have adaptation to environment and dynamic combination of service building blocks into new applications. Here, we present the approach of the FP7 ALIVE project to the use of formal models of coordination and organisation mechanisms to deliver a flexible, high-level means to describe the structure of interactions between services in the environment. Our aim is to create a framework for services engineering for "live" open systems of active services. We propose to build on the current activities in service-oriented engineering by defining three levels: (i) An organisational level models the organisational structure of executing and interlinked services and the context around them. (ii) A coordination level provides flexible ways to model interaction between the services. (iii) These two levels connect with existing (semantic)Web services, which contain semantic descriptions to make components aware of their social context and of the rules of engagement with other services. © Springer-Verlag 2009.