Where this record would change its mind

Every figure on this map comes from a drawing, and the drawing is a set of judgements. This page sets out which judgements, and what each one is worth.

Three that would gut it

If a lease does not need a local account. The three-step ring at the centre of this record opens, and a share of the thirty-four rings through the account goes with it. This is the single most consequential hard marking in the drawing.

If a registered address has another route. Most situations allow one: somebody else's lease, a letter, a declaration. The map excludes those because they are not general, and the cost of excluding them is that the central knot may not exist for a particular reader at all. If the same dependency appears in a distributed team, managers may look at the present configuration while interpreting every signal beside completed work and staff feedback.

If the room for the first weeks keeps longer than sixty days. Eleven of the nineteen outrun rings stop being outrun, and this record's claim about laps consuming their own input loses more than half its examples. Readers looking beyond this abstract map can compare it with material published by Harvard University.

Any one of the three, decided the other way, would leave a substantially milder record.

Three that would strengthen it

If provisional cover against illness is not generally available. Eight rings in the upper half of the map become shut, and the count of shut rings rises from seventeen to a much less comfortable number.

If a provisional room is not accepted for a lease or a deposit. The twelve rings the room opens become shut. That is the single largest block of give in the map, and it rests on two markings.

If an appointment can never be obtained against an incomplete file. The two appointment rings stay shut, as drawn, and the argument that events cannot be provisional extends further than this record currently claims.

What does not move

Three things are robust to all six.

The three-step floor. Only three steps in the map wait on nothing, and that figure is produced by hard markings nobody is likely to dispute: a copy of a passport page, a qualification certificate and a birth record genuinely wait on nothing.

The shape of the expiry pattern. Documents asserting current circumstances keep for ninety days; registrations and events never expire. Moving any individual figure does not disturb the correspondence.

The concentration. Thirty-four of forty-six rings through one step is a consequence of mutual verification, not of any particular marking. Change several edges and the hub moves; it does not disappear.

The fragile part of this record is how much give there is. The robust part is that the tangle has a centre.

The test a reader can apply

Take any one of the eight soft dependencies, printed by name in this part of the record, and decide it the other way. Then look at what it opened.

The figures say up to because ten rings have two soft links, so losing one of them does not always shut the ring.

Why publish this at all

Because the alternative is a record that asks to be believed.

Everything on this map is arithmetic on a drawing. The arithmetic is exact and can be checked by anybody who reproduces the drawing. The drawing cannot be checked at all, except by somebody who disagrees with a specific edge and says which.

Printing the six most consequential judgements, with what each is worth, is the only way to make that disagreement possible in a useful form.

A record that publishes its own weak points is not weaker for it. It is the only kind that can be argued with instead of believed.

What a second drawing would settle

Three things, and none of them needs access to anything private.

Whether the hard markings hold. Somebody who has been through this would know, for each of the ninety-four dependencies, whether the waiting step really cannot be begun. That is the one question this record cannot answer and almost anybody with the experience can.

Whether the map is missing steps. Thirty-six is a drawing decision. A real situation might need forty, and the extra four could close rings this record has no way of seeing.

Whether the days are the right order of magnitude. Not the exact figures, which are the map's own, but the ratios: is a decision really several times longer than a registration, is a reservation really shorter-lived than the time it takes to get.

None of that requires naming a country, an office or a kind of permission, and a second drawing that did name one would be worth less rather than more, because it would go stale.

The thing this record most needs is not better data. It is a second person drawing the same object and disagreeing about the edges.

What this record cannot answer

That dependency is the wrong thing to draw.

What actually determines how long any of this takes may be nothing in this map: who is at the desk, what mood they are in, whether the person asking can explain themselves in the local language. If that is the dominant effect, then every figure here is a careful measurement of the wrong object.

This record has no way to settle that, and it would be dishonest to pretend the question is minor. It names no country, no office and no kind of permission, states no requirement, and offers one thing only: the shape of what waits on what, drawn so that it can be checked.