An institutional network that connects many independently governed spaces. A shared university-level network where many independent groups can create their own spaces, publish, collaborate, and control visibility.

Concept	Definition
University Network	One institutional umbrella with many spaces, groups, permissions, and public/private content
Public Network	Fully open publishing/discovery

The University Network should provide:

Institutional identity and membership.

Discovery of people, groups, spaces, and knowledge.

A default trusted audience.

Shared navigation, search, and feeds.

The possibility of accessing or requesting access to restricted spaces.

Inside that network, researchers, departments, working groups, projects, courses, and students can create their own Spaces.

Each space independently determines:

Who owns or administers it.

Who may contribute.

Who may read it.

Whether it is visible outside the university.

Whether its documents can be referenced, transcluded, or republished elsewhere.

University Network is ecosystem of autonomous spaces

“Mostly access” should be a default audience, not a privacy boundary

The university affiliation can establish a default rule:

Members of the University Network can normally read this space.

But that should be configurable per space:

University-visible — everyone in the faculty or university can read.

Group-only — only members of a working group can read.

Public — accessible outside the university.

Private — accessible only to explicitly invited people.

Mixed — the space is discoverable, but some documents are restricted.

A researcher should not need to create a completely separate network just because a particular project is confidential.

Separate four concepts

1. Network

A social and institutional trust context.

Examples:

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Faculty of Physics

A multi-university research consortium

The network answers:

Who belongs to this institutional context?

2. Space

An autonomous knowledge and collaboration context.

Examples:

Astrophysics Research Group

Quantum Materials Lab

Master’s course on Cosmology

PhD student reading group

European research project

The space answers:

Who governs this body of work?

3. Audience

The people who can access a particular space or document.

Examples:

Anyone

University members

Faculty members

Space members

Explicitly invited identities

The audience answers:

Who can see this?

4. Role

What a person may do.

Examples:

Reader

Contributor

Editor

Administrator

The role answers:

What can this person do here?

A concrete example

The Faculty of Physics creates a Faculty Network.

Within it:

The Condensed Matter group creates its own space.

A professor creates a space for a course.

Three researchers create a restricted grant-proposal space.

A doctoral student creates a reading-notes space.

The faculty creates a public outreach space.

By default, new spaces might be readable by faculty members, while their creators retain control over contribution and administration.

Documents can still connect across those spaces. A course can reference a paper review from a research group without copying it or transferring ownership. A public document can cite a university-only document even when an external reader cannot open the target.

What I would rename

Instead of a private network, I would use:

Organization Network

Institutional Network

University Network

Or simply Network, with configurable membership and visibility

“Private” describes one possible access policy. It should not define the object itself.

The strongest product statement would be:

A University Network connects people and autonomous spaces under a shared institutional identity.

Technically, this is also more consistent with a distributed model: the overall university state emerges from the states and relationships of its independently controlled components rather than from one central workspace. That resembles the distributed-systems distinction between local component states and a composed global state.