CW21 - Collaborative Ideas session

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash.

The Collaborative Ideas session is used to get people talking about their work. You can discuss the work you're doing, work you would like to do, or problems you are facing. Other people in the group can then talk about how they could help get your new project off the ground, or help solve the problem you are facing. This is an excellent way of generating project ideas for the Hack Day.

Hackathon

Schedule and group assignments

The CW21 Collaborative Ideas session will take place on Wednesday, 31 March 2021 from 11:20 - 12:30 BST (10:20-11:30 UTC). Participants will be assigned into breakout groups.

 

What to do at the Collaborative Ideas session

Once you arrive in your breakout room:

  • Introduce yourselves!
  • Select a Chair and a Scribe.
  • Take it in turns to introduce something about your work that is important to you. It can be anything: a new project you want to get started, a policy that you want to see adopted, the skeleton of a concept that you want flesh out, a tool that you want built, a problem that you face - anything! If it's on your mind and you think discussing it with a group of leading researchers and software developers could help, then this is the place to discuss it.
  • Make a decision about which idea is most likely to be taken forward. Selecting only one idea can be very difficult! (Even if your idea isn't taken forward during the session, you can submit it yourself later during the workshop).
  • Help the scribe complete the Collaborative Ideas form.

 

Notes for the Scribe

The scribe should record some notes about the group's idea in the Collaborative Ideas form (which will be a templated Google Doc). It should take about 15 minutes to fill out the form. The information needed is:

  • Idea Title
  • Context/Research Domain: one or two sentences that will help us understand where the idea comes from: a specific field of research, a general field of work or something wider.
  • Problem: a couple of sentences that describe the problem that the idea will help solve (25-100 words)
  • Solution: a couple of sentences that describes how the idea will help solve the problem (200-500 words)
  • Diagram/illustration: please provide any diagrams or images that support your idea. It could be something you've created yourself or it could be an existing image from the web (please include attribution as necessary).
  • Team members: Please provide the names of the people in your group. This allows us to trace the idea back to its originators (and if your team should win the prizes then we can get them to the right people).
  • Hack Day Idea Proposer: If you would like this idea to be taken to the Hack Day, please provide the name of the Idea Proposer. It is the Idea Proposer's job to describe the idea during the pitching session, and try to attract people to work on the idea during the Hack Day (more information below).
  • Hack Day Idea Proposer's email address: an email address for the Idea Proposer.
  • After submitting your idea you can continue to work on it, fleshing out ideas and even starting work on the pitch for the Hack Day, or you can work on a second idea.

 

Do you want your Collaborative Idea to make it to the Hack Day?

Some ideas are so good that they simply need to be realised. This is where the Hack Day comes in: at the end of the Collaborative Ideas session, you can state whether your idea should be pitched during the Hack Day.

If you want your idea to be submitted to the Hack Day, someone in your group must nominate themselves as the Hack Day Idea Proposer (the person who will pitch the idea at the start of the Hack Day in an attempt to attract a team to work on the idea). The Hack Day Idea Proposer must put their name and email address in the appropriate fields of the Collaborative Ideas form (see above for detail). If these fields are left blank, the idea may not be carried through to the Hack Day.

 

Ideas mean prizes

Not all ideas from the Collaborative Ideas session will go on to be used in the Hack Day, but there will be prizes for the best Collaborative Ideas regardless of whether they make it to the Hack Day. All the ideas will be collated and anyone at the workshop can vote for their favourite ideas. 

The Collaborative Ideas groups to come in 1st, 2nd and 3rd place will win prizes! This year, the prizes are Redbubble digital gift cards, which give the recipients the choice of millions of designs by independent artists printed on a range of products. Redbubble are committed to social responsibility and sustainability, and digital gift cards provide a more international- and pandemic-friendly prize for our participants.

The prizes for the winning Collaborative Ideas group members are as follows:

  • First place: £30 Redbubble digital gift card
  • Second place: £20 Redbubble digital gift card
  • Third place: £10 Redbubble digital gift card

Image of a Redbubble £30 digital gift card

 

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