It can be observed that most technological artefacts are becoming intelligent "things that think" and most of these intelligent objects will be linked together to an "Internet of things". To master this omnipresent virtual "organism", completely new design and operation paradigms have to evolve. In this paper we discuss how research of our group at the University of Paderborn is providing fundamental principles, methods, and tools to design real-time operating systems for this virtual "organism" of the future. Based on our fine-granular library for the construction of reflexive RTOS, the necessary configuration tool and its on-line version are discussed. Next step towards self-coordination is a profile management system to support self-optimization of the RTOS. The included flexible resource manager allows migration of RTOS services dynamically between programmable processors and re-configurable HW. In a final step the RTOS itself can be distributed. Its services are provided by a cluster of instances instead of a single one. This makes a sophisticated dynamically self-optimizing communication system necessary.