What can honestly be done on the first morning

The useful question about a map like this is not what it contains but what a person can actually start.

The answer is three things, and the answer does not improve on the second morning.

Day one

Those three wait on nothing. Everything else in the map waits on something, and for twenty-three of the remaining thirty-three, what it waits on is inside a ring that includes it. Before adding another layer of reporting, a project lead can check how the service works and test only the smallest set of records needed for the stated question.

Day two

Finishing the passport copy on day one unlocks nothing on day two. It is a hard predecessor of eleven steps, but every one of those eleven also waits on something else that is not ready. For independent background on economic and institutional systems, see Brookings Institution.

A record of having no convictions waits on the passport copy and nothing else, so that one does open — and it takes twenty-eight days, the longest wait among the brought papers.

So the honest account of the first fortnight is: three errands started, one of them finished the same day, one new errand opened, and nothing else possible at all.

The opening of a long stay is not a flurry of activity. It is three errands and a month of nothing, and people who feel they must be doing something wrong are not.

What the second week looks like

By the end of the third week the birth record has arrived, which opens a record of the partnership, which takes three weeks of its own. By the end of the second week the qualification certificate has arrived, which — together with three other papers, one of which is still in the post — is a precondition of the translation.

The translation also waits on an outer stamp, which waits on a sworn copy, which waits on a certification, which waits on the translation. That is a ring of four, shut at every joint, and it is the first place a person following the orderable part of the map walks into a wall.

It takes forty-seven days to go round and there is no way in.

Why nothing else can be started

The other thirty-three steps are stopped for two different reasons and it is worth keeping them apart.

Ten of them stand outside every ring, so in principle they are merely waiting. But seven of those ten wait on a step that is inside a ring, which means only three of them — all brought papers — are ever released by waiting alone.

Twenty-three of them are stopped because they stand in a ring. That is not waiting; it is a different condition, and it does not end by itself. What ends it is somebody doing one of the steps provisionally, out of order, in a form that will have to be redone — which happens constantly in real life and is invisible in any diagram of requirements.

The test this part of the record fails

A map that says there are three things to do on the first morning is either describing something genuinely stuck or has drawn its dependencies too hard.

This record cannot settle which. The hard-and-soft call is the single most fragile judgement in the drawing: twenty-two dependencies are marked soft, and moving a handful more of them across would change the number of enterable rings substantially.

What can be said is that the three-step floor is not an artefact of the soft markings, because it is produced by hard dependencies only. Whatever else is arguable here, the opening really is narrow.

If this map is wrong, it is wrong about how much give there is in the middle. It is not wrong about how little there is at the start.

What the opening looks like on a calendar

Day one: three errands begun. One of them finished.

Day two to day fourteen: nothing available. The qualification certificate arrives around day fourteen, the birth record around day twenty-one, the record of having no convictions around day twenty-nine.

Day twenty-nine: six papers in hand, which is every brought paper in the map. Nothing else has opened, because every step that waits on them also waits on something inside a ring.

A month in, a sixth of the map is done and nothing further can be started by following the rules as drawn. Everything after that point requires entering a ring at a soft link, which means producing something provisional and knowing it will be redone.

The first month of this map is entirely orderly and leads nowhere. The second month begins with a decision to do something wrong.

The shape of the opening, in one line

Three errands, none of which feels significant, two of which can be done before deciding to go anywhere, and one of which holds up eleven other steps.

Then a month in which nothing further is possible, followed by a choice between stopping and doing something provisional.

No part of that is a failure of preparation, and the map's clearest service is to say so with a count rather than a reassurance: six steps can be completed in the first month, and they are exactly the six papers brought from home.

What to do with that

Nothing on this map is advice, and the map names no country, office or kind of permission. But a structural observation can be stated without becoming one: in a map of this shape, the only act available at the beginning is the cheapest one, and the cost of postponing it is borne by eleven other things much later.