One paragraph: what this démarche is, who must do it, what happens if you don't.

Éligibilité / Qui est concerné

Plain-language conditions. Note per-nationality or per-status differences explicitly.

Étapes

High-level stages in order (what, where, roughly when — NOT click-by-click portal automation; portals change and click-paths rot).

Pièces justificatives

Every document needed, with the acceptable forms (original / copy / translation / apostille). Link entries in ../pieces/ where a shared checklist exists.

Délais et échéances

Deadlines, processing times, and what starts the clock. Consequences of missing them.

Portail / Où faire la démarche

The official site or office (link ../portails/). Cost, payment method (timbre fiscal…).

En cas de blocage

OPTIONAL until real blockage knowledge exists — then REQUIRED to live here, inside the démarche it blocks (not as a separate card). See « En cas de blocage » below for the section's own rules.

Pièges connus

Real-world gotchas (prefecture variances, RDV scarcity, look-alike paid sites…).

Sources

REQUIRED: one official source per factual claim above (service-public.fr, ANEF, legifrance, impots.gouv.fr, caf.fr…) with the date you checked it.

Other folders (same frontmatter + sources rules)

This template's sections are for demarches/ guides. The other folders keep the same front-matter and citation discipline but their own natural sections:

documents/ — what a document is, its issuer, its field structure, how to obtain or replace it, and how it is used elsewhere.
pieces/ — supporting-document checklists and acceptance rules.
portails/ — official portals and how to spot look-alikes.
box-maps/ — per-form box semantics; see the folder's own README for its rules.

« En cas de blocage » — how to unstick a démarche (crowdsource your fix!)

When a démarche fails because the STATE fails (a téléservice bug, a silent préfecture, a lost form), the fix knowledge is discovered by individuals and usually dies in group chats. Every guide can carry an « En cas de blocage » section that captures it, inside the démarche it blocks — being stuck is a state of a démarche, not a démarche of its own. (Reference implementation: fr/demarches/renouvellement-titre-de-sejour.md.) When one blockage genuinely spans several démarches (a portal-wide outage pattern), document it once in the most-affected guide and link it from the others. The section's sub-parts:

The symptom — the exact error/blockage, quoted.
Known causes & fixes — one per bullet, each labelled observed practice with a date (per CONTRIBUTING). This is the crowdsourced heart: found a fix that worked? PR that ONE bullet with when/how you observed it. Forked resolutions (different fixes "worked" for the same symptom) are almost always under-specified context, so every bullet carries its discriminator: when [observable context] → do [fix] (observed MM/YYYY). A fix PR without a "when" gets asked for one in review. Order bullets by cost (harmless checks first; fixes with side effects — e.g. a redeposit that duplicates a dossier — last and flagged). Genuine contradictions coexist, dated ("mixed reports"); the freshness rule retires whichever the administration's next patch obsoletes. If one symptom accumulates many bullets, promote it to its own subsection (the section organizes symptom → fixes).
The evidence spec — what support demands (screenshot rules, documents), so the next person's first message is complete.
The escalation ladder — official support → formal levers (Défenseur des droits…) → the legal rung, each with realistic timelines.
Pièges + Sources (jurisprudence when it exists; observed practice labelled).

Fixes go stale when the administration patches the bug — the 6-month freshness rule applies with extra force here; date everything.

Cross-border content — file by role, never by direction

A cross-border journey (e.g. using a Nigerian birth certificate for a French visa) is composed from two single-jurisdiction files — never written as its own card:

the destination dictates the requirement → <destination>/pieces/foreign-documents.md (origin-agnostic);
the origin provides the authentication mechanism → <origin>/demarches/authenticate-documents.md (destination-agnostic).

Use exactly those two filenames in every jurisdiction so files compose. Never encode a direction in a filename (…-for-france.md is the anti-pattern: it fans out per country pair and files one country's requirements under another country's folder).

Proposer une nouvelle fiche