Identity journey 2 of 6 · Cedar Farm Cooperative and Cedar Valley Growers
An organization and a community
What persists when a cooperative renames itself, changes directors, acquires facilities, or merges — and how does a community differ from it?
An organization keeps its identity through renaming, reorganization, and changes of authority. A merger or dissolution may raise a genuine succession question, and a community is neither its members nor the organizations that serve it.
What this journey shows
- A rename registers a successor name; the RID and the old name both persist.
- Issuer, operator, owner, member, and steward are separate roles.
- Succession to a genuinely new legal entity is a governance decision, recorded with provenance.
What it does not imply
- That an organization’s RID stands for its members, its farms, its offices, or the communities it serves.
- That membership is ownership, or that a community kind is registered.
- That every structural change creates, or never creates, a new identity.
Steps
Journal
An Organization Through Change
Organizations rename, reorganize, acquire facilities, hand over their systems, merge, and dissolve. This Journal follows the fictional Cedar Farm Cooperative through each of those events to show what RSM ID keeps constant, what it records as changing governance, where a genuine succession question begins — and why a community is not the organizations that serve it.
Seednote
Community
A continuing collective of people, described by the semantic class rsm:Community, for which no registered naming kind yet exists.
Fieldnote
Why identity is not ownership
Why RSM ID keeps issuance authority, legal ownership, custody, stewardship, and a person's own autonomy as separate relationships — for farms, watersheds, communities, and people alike — and what would break if it did not.
Seednote
Identity lifecycle
The registry status of an RID: active, deprecated, superseded, retired, or reserved.
Viewgraph
Identity lifecycle
Reserved, active, deprecated, superseded, and retired as Document 08 v1.1 defines them, the permitted transitions, why no state ever frees an RID for reuse, and how an organization's rename, a sensor's retirement, and a formation's completion each relate to them.
Fieldnote
Why semantic equivalence is not identity equality
Why RSM ID never merges identities on similarity, sameAs claims, or shared source files — whether the records describe two people, two parcels, two watershed models, or two organizations — and what an authorized equivalence decision needs instead.
All journeys and pathwaysRelated pathway: E, Real-World ApplicationsNext journey: A place and a living system