Recently there has been an increasing interest to harness the potential of P2P technology to design and build rich environments where services are provided and multiple applications can be supported in a flexible and dynamic manner. In such a context, resource assignment to services and applications is crucial. Current approaches require significant "manual-mode" operations and/or rely on centralized servers to maintain resource availability. Such approaches are neither scalable nor robust enough. Our contribution towards the solution of this problem is proposing and evaluating a gossip-based protocol to automatically partition the available nodes into "slices", also taking into account specific attributes of the nodes. These slices can be assigned to run services or applications in a fully selforganizing but controlled manner. The main advantages of the proposed protocol are extreme scalability and robustness. We present approximative theoretical models and extensive empirical analysis of the proposed protocol.