Sharing & access¶

"Who can see this?" is one of the most important questions in any shared tool — and one of the easiest to get wrong elsewhere. Initiative keeps it simple by building access up in layers, from the outside in. This section walks through those layers, then shows you how to share specific projects and documents.

The simple version¶

To see or edit something, you have to clear each gate in turn:

graph LR
  A["In the guild?"] --> B["In the initiative?"]
  B --> C["Does your role<br/>allow this tool?"]
  C --> D["Is this item<br/>shared with you?"]
  D --> E["✅ Access"]

1. Are you in the guild? If not, you don't see anything in it. Full stop.
2. Are you in the initiative? Even inside a guild, an initiative is only visible to the people added to it. This is the big privacy boundary — it's how the "spring play" team can keep their work away from the "summer show" team.
3. Does your role allow this kind of thing? Your initiative role decides which tools you can use — for example, whether you can create projects or only view them.
4. Is this particular item shared with you? Finally, each project and document can be shared with specific people or roles, at a view, edit, or own level. See Sharing projects & documents.

You only reach something when all four are satisfied. It sounds like a lot, but in practice it's intuitive: join a group, join an effort, get the right role, and have things shared with you.

Two important exceptions¶

Two people can see more than the layers above would suggest, by design:

• Guild administrators can always see and manage everything in their own guild. Someone has to be able to keep the lights on.
• Support staff (on a hosted service) can be granted temporary, time-limited, recorded access to help with a problem — never a permanent back door, and always logged. See Security & privacy.

Why a missing item shows as "not found," not "denied"¶

If you're not in an initiative, its projects and documents don't appear as locked doors — they simply aren't there for you. Trying to open a direct link to one gives a "not found" result rather than "access denied." That's deliberate: it avoids even revealing that the item exists, which is itself a small leak of information.

In this section¶