Open the Strategy Room — The Lumen Atlas Planning Cycle

A four-round, advanced strategy simulation set inside the Lumen Atlas Foundation, a Cambridge (UK) non-profit that runs Atlas — one of the world's ten most-visited reference sites: 14 million volunteer-edited articles, 480 million monthly readers, GBP 92M of mostly small-donor revenue, 340 staff but 240,000 active volunteer editors who expect to be consulted on anything that touches the platform. On 4 March 2026 the Board orders a 2026–2031 strategy in 90 days (AI-content response, a new revenue line, a governance update) — and within 48 hours a volunteer leaks the memo to the community forum. Playing the Chief Strategy Officer, you must run the planning cycle in full public view, with a hard 15 June Board deadline (miss it and the Board appoints the external consultancy that triggered the 2021 revolt). The simulation operationalises Loizos Heracleous's study of open, dialogic strategy-making at Wikimedia: inclusion (who participates) and transparency (what is shared) are two independent, costed dials, not one open/closed switch. Round 1 — assign each of nine stakeholder groups (core editors, casual editors, chapter affiliates, major donors, small donors, staff, the Board, partner institutions, readers) an inclusion level (co-create / consult / inform / exclude) inside a GBP 600K, 10-week participation budget. Round 2 — set transparency per phase (problem framing, option generation, financial modelling, recommendation) and choose input channels, deciding when the GBP 20M AI-licensing figure becomes public. Round 3 — reconcile 740 proposals clustering into four irreconcilable camps (purist / license-to-AI / premium tier / status-quo) into a single coherent five-year spine of at most three priorities, choosing what to reject and how to tell rejected camps they were heard. Round 4 — win the split Board vote (three community-elected trustees, four appointed) WHILE holding community legitimacy, and respond to a live editing-freeze threat from 600 editors without surrendering coherence or capitulating by ultimatum. The math rewards costed inclusion, phase-dependent transparency, reconciliation-by-rejection, and winning approval and legitimacy together — and punishes the five classic errors: maximal co-creation that blows the budget and deadline, premature transparency on half-formed figures, averaging all four camps into a focus-free plan, winning the vote while losing the community-elected trustees, and instant capitulation to a loud faction. Final KPIs track Buy-in, Idea Quality, Legitimacy and Coherence.