Implementing self-management is hard, especially when building large scale distributed systems. Publish/subscribe middlewares, scientific visualization and collaboration tools and corporate operational information systems are examples of one class of systems, distributed information flow infrastructures, that could benefit from self management. This paper presents IFLOW, an autonomic middleware for implementing these different distributed systems in a self-managing way. IFLOW reduces different messaging models down to a common information flow abstraction, creates a self-managing implementation of that abstraction and then provides a substrate for building diverse information flow systems. We describe the design and implementation of IFLOW and describe case studies of implementing different messaging models as self-managing systems.