You are Rehana Malik, Chief Strategy Officer of the Lumen Atlas Foundation in Cambridge. The Board wants a five-year plan by 15 June, the memo that ordered it is already circulating among 240,000 volunteer editors, and before anything else you must decide who sits down to write the plan and who is only told about it.
The situation
Lumen Atlas runs Atlas, one of the ten most-visited reference sites in the world: 14 million articles in 38 languages, 480 million readers a month. It takes in GBP 92 million a year, 87% of it from 7.1 million small donors, and employs 340 staff. But the encyclopaedia is written and governed by 240,000 volunteers over whom the Foundation has almost no authority; 1,200 of them produce 41% of the content.
For the first time, reading has gone flat: AI assistants answer questions that used to bring readers, and donations follow reading on a lag. A consortium of AI firms is offering GBP 20 million a year to license the content, and the leaked memo names the offer. On the forum, opinion has already split into four camps. In 2021 a plan written behind closed doors with a consultancy was rejected by 71% of the community and abandoned; you were in that room.
You have GBP 600,000 and ten weeks. Nine groups are waiting for their place: core editors, casual editors, chapter affiliates, major donors and grant-makers, small donors, staff, the Board, partner institutions and readers. Each one you can invite to co-create the plan with drafting rights (GBP 120,000 and 4 weeks per group), consult (GBP 45,000 and 1.5 weeks), inform (GBP 8,000 and 0.3 weeks) or leave out. The Board that will vote has seven members: three elected by the community and four appointed. Miss June and a consultancy writes the plan.