As introduced in Section 2.1, a DIDO community is a community of interest (CoI) responsible for the architecture, design, implementation, maintenance, and eventual sunset (yes, all good things come to an end) of DIDO networks and its DIDO nodes. DIDO communities should have a well-documented, repeatable, traceable, transparent, and unbiased process that is managed and run by a governing board (or hierarchy of governing boards). Often the DIDO community is divided into two organizations: one responsible for the software, usually as an open source software (OSS) project, and the other responsible for managing the fungible data (e.g., currency or commodity) managed by the software. Most DIDO communities choose or select DIDO software designed, implemented, and maintained by another party. For example, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and IOTA all provide their software for others to use as OSS.
Some DIDO communities may support multiple kinds of immutable data objects within a single DIDO network, or they can support multiple networks that each have different kinds of immutable data object types. For example, one DIDO community’s OSS might support cryptocurrencies on one DIDO network and support immutable data objects representing supply chain commodities on another.
Unless a DIDO network’s focus is very narrow, there is generally a need to have an exchange that allows different immutable data objects to be exchanged (e.g., US dollars to Bitcoins). The exchange might support the exchange of immutable data objects that are all contained within one DIDO network, or it might support the exchange of information managed by one DIDO community but on different DIDO networks. In this case, the exchange might manage converting customer loyalty reward points to a currency (i.e., euros or cryptocurrency) or supply chain commodities to cryptocurrencies and back. Other exchanges might exchange immutable data objects managed by one DIDO community and DIDO network with a cryptocurrency managed by another DIDO community; for example, the exchange of Bitcoins to Ethereum or Iotas.
