Create This Day Projects

Update: Create This Day is going to be put on hold.

Instead, we’ll focus on planning and preparedness work during March and April and circle back to this later. 

What is Create This Day?

Ever had this thought…

apply-now

If we could just…

If we could just get the right people in the same place for one day, we could solve this problem!

Create This Day is meant to give you the opportunity to take that day and work with those people to solve a problem!

Based on principles like rapid prototyping, agile development, and encouraging innovation, the Create This Day events are intended to provide a creative path from inspiration to prototype with an eye toward moving successful prototypes toward production. Putting the right people together at the same time can produce remarkable results in a short time. Let’s see what we can do together.

We’d like for anyone in any role with a bright idea to feel free to bring it forward and invest a day with a team in creating something to make that idea a step more possible.

What you create could be software, processes, designs, documentation, APIs, virtual team proposals — the sky’s the limit!


How long does it take?

It shouldn’t be a major time sink. A Create This Day project has somewhere less than 24 hours of real time commitment among these phases:

  • Making a proposal: An hour-ish
    • You can write up a proposal online: 715325442715325442Create This Day proposal: (Project name here)Make a Create This Day proposal 
      (Log in to the Wiki to use this button.)
    • You can attend one of the brainstorming sessions
  • Building a team: An hour-ish
    • Invite people with the skill sets you’re looking for
    • Choose one day (in April) when you’re all free to work on it 
  • Project management / design time: A couple hours
    • Basic project planning suggestions are embedded in the proposal template
    • Working out major and minor targets in sequence is a good idea
  • Create This Day itself: One day
    • Get together in person and/or online and Do The Thing!
    • Most teams use 8:30 – 5 Central for their “day”, but some have chosen to use part of the evening as well
  • Show and tell: A few minutes for giving your presentation; a couple hours for the reveal day celebrations
    • Each project should show off what they accomplished.
    • At least one person from each team should either attend the reveal day or make a two-to-five-minute “here’s our project” video.

What is Create This Day good for? 

Create This Day is good for things like:

  • Prototyping and proof of concepts  
    • Examples: The Illini Spaces website and IT Services Catalog website both began as Create This Day projects
  • Design, collaboration, and learning time
    • Examples: Several teams have used Create This Day to work on learning and skill-building projects like no-code development
  • Problem-solving, with or without code
    • Examples:  Battery recycling, broader outreach for job openings, and creating a community of interest around design thinking were all code-free examples of Create This Day projects.
  • “Getting it done”
    • Examples: Policy revisions, group documentation review, and other “it’s been on the back burner for a while, let’s just get it done” projects are also good candidates for Create This Day.

(And what is Create This Day not so good for?)

Create This Day is not as well suited for things like:

  • Major projects with months of work
    • You could “Create This Day” one piece of a project, but not the whole thing
  • “From initial concept to live in production in 24 hours”
    • You can certainly prototype something for consideration for promotion to production. But it’s rare that something would go through the entire project process, including any necessary security and QA and accessibility reviews and support infrastructure establishment, in one day.

How do we get from here to Create This Day?

Every Create This Day team has some points in common:

  1. Someone identified a problem that needed to be solved and proposed it.
  2. Someone agreed to lead the Create This Day team for that proposal.
  3. People who liked the idea agreed to become teammates for that proposal.
  4. The team chose one day where they could all be available to work on the project and cleared it with their manager and teammates.
  5. During that chosen day, the team worked on that proposal.
  6. At the end of the day, the team reflected on what they had accomplished in that day, put together a small presentation, and showed it to the community at the “Create This Day Reveal.”
    1. In Spring 2020, the Reveal day is tentatively scheduled for the morning of April 30.

Here’s the upcoming timeline:

1) (March 2020) Contribute ideas and create proposals

  • You can make a proposal by filling out this form: 715325442715325442Create This Day proposal: (Project name here)Make a Create This Day proposal
    (Log in to the Wiki to use this button.)
  • If you’re not sure what sounds like an appropriately-sized idea, you can also attend a group brainstorming session:
  • Pick out an idea or two that you’d like to support!

2) (March 2020) Form teams around those proposals

  • Every team needs one person to step up and be the team leader. 
    • Sometimes this is the person who proposed the idea.
    • Sometimes someone else takes the leader role.
    • The team leader acts as project manager: confirming the volunteers, finding the best day for your team, and setting up a rough strategy for the day.
  • Anyone who’s interested can offer to join a team.
    • Take a look at the existing proposals.
    • If you’re interested, edit the proposal page to add yourself to the “interested” list.
    • If you’d like to be updated, subscribe to edits to the page.
    • (We don’t recommend subscribing to the entire space unless you’re super interested!)

3) (April 2020) Pick your team’s Day and do the thing!

  • A tool like Doodle.com can be helpful for picking the best day for your Create This Day team.
  • Let your daily teammates know which day your Create This Day team is meeting, so they can plan for “vacation day”-type coverage procedures.
  • You can reserve a conference room, hold your team session virtually, or both.
  • You might find Google Jamboard a helpful sticky-note-and-scribbles digital whiteboard if you have some remote attendees.

4) (By April 30): Show us what you did

  • We encourage at least one member of each team to plan to attend the Reveal Day (tentatively scheduled for the morning of April 30).
  • If no one is available on that day, you can also make a two-to-five-minute video telling us what project you took on and what the results look like.