Autonomic networking set a challenge for the research community to engineer systems and architectures that will increase the QoS and robustness of future network architectures. However, our experience is that so far the autonomic network research community does not have a common perception of what an autonomic network is. This paper attempts to propose a generic model for autonomic systems, along with a minimum set of required properties that would render a system compliant to this model. The paper emphasises the importance of such a common model for the credibility of the research community as well as to eliminate attempts to unnecessarily overload or blur the scope of the field.