Be Civic — Expat Lifecycle
The five-stage expat progression — pre-arrival through onward relocation — with the dossier shape each stage produces.
Expat Lifecycle
Intent
This diagram captures the customer-segment frame that anchors the post-pivot product. It answers the question: what are the stages a third-country expat moves through, and what does each stage require? The lifecycle is the primary axis along which skills and paths are organized; understanding it is prerequisite to understanding why the corpus is structured the way it is. The diagram is intended as the shared frame for corpus authors, harness developers, and product decisions about which procedures to prioritize next.
Entities
- Pre-arrival — the period before the expat moves to Belgium: visa research, employer paperwork, country-of-origin document preparation. Spans months before the move.
- Arrival — the first weeks in Belgium: commune registration, residence permit application, social security sign-up, and bank account opening. High administrative density and strict deadlines.
- Settling — the first six months: mutuelle enrollment, tax number and fiche processing, housing paperwork, and family registration if dependants join later. Procedures branch significantly depending on the expat's family and employment situation.
- Established — years two through approximately nine: career progression, family expansion, property purchase, and the nationality eligibility countdown. Lower procedure density, higher stakes per procedure.
- Onward / relocating — year five and beyond: the 12bis nationality declaration path, or exit (relocation to another country). A terminal fork in the lifecycle.
- Persona — a descriptor node representing the cross-cutting user characteristics: intent varies by stage, prompting fluency varies by individual, urgency is consistently high because administrative deadlines are real.
- Visa dossier — the document set assembled in pre-arrival; the corpus's earliest procedural domain.
- Arrival dossier — the set of residence and social-security artefacts assembled in the first weeks.
- Settling dossier — the set of mutuelle, tax, and housing artefacts assembled over the first six months.
- Periodic + nationality dossier — the recurring compliance and major milestone artefacts of the established phase.
- Closure / handover dossier — the artefacts required for nationality declaration or orderly exit from Belgium.
Relationships
- Stage progression (pre-arrival → arrival → settling → established → onward) — the canonical lifecycle flow; each stage is a precondition for the next, though users may enter the corpus at any stage.
- Each stage produces a dossier — every stage generates a distinct set of documents and procedural records; the dossier shape drives which skills and paths are relevant at that point.
- Persona informs early choices — the persona descriptor is shown influencing the pre-arrival stage specifically because it is where user characteristics (visa type, employment situation, family composition) most sharply determine which procedure branches apply.
Design notes
The lifecycle is the product's wedge — not a user cohort frame, but a procedural domain frame. The same user traverses all five stages over time; the same corpus asset serves every stage. This means skills and paths should be authored for durability across the lifecycle rather than optimized for any single stage.
The dossier shape per stage is a design signal, not a strict schema. In the corpus, dossiers are the natural grouping unit for related skills: a user in the arrival stage needs commune registration, residence permit, and social-security skills as a coherent set. Path definitions that compose these skills can use the dossier concept as their organizing principle.
The diagram currently marks "persona" as a single node with varied characteristics. In practice, the persona descriptors (intent, prompting fluency, urgency) interact with lifecycle stage in ways the diagram does not yet show — urgency is uniformly high, but the nature of the urgency shifts (days-to-register versus years-to-nationality). (Open question: should the corpus carry explicit stage-tagging on skills so the harness can surface a stage-appropriate subset without enumerating all skills?)
Related
- Spec: lifecycle.md — state-machine promotion model (§9) that governs how skills progress from draft to stable within each lifecycle stage domain
- Spec: skills.md — skill-drafting protocol (§15) including how stage context is expressed in skill frontmatter
- Related diagrams: overview · corpus-internals