As the rising sun streamed though windows Tuesday, submissions from people all over the city began streaming into The Daily News.

A little girl smiled at her sister. A community mourned the loss of a respected elder. A couple visited a neonatal nurse with their newborn son.

Piece by piece, a portrait of the city’s people is emerging. After months of planning and spreading the word, The Daily News’ Kamloops Project is taking shape as a remarkable documentary of a day in the life.

A baton has been passed to readers, who have until 5 p.m. today to make their contributions to the portrait.

“I’m very pleased with the submissions coming in,” said editor Mel Rothenburger. “They started early in the morning as people got up and out of bed and were enjoying the sunrise. They’re sending us photos of the sunrise, pictures of their dog, their friends and relatives.”

While set in the day-to-day routine of people’s lives, the submissions offer a great deal of insight beyond everyday matters.

“They’re saying some very poignant things about the city and what a great place it is, some really important things about family and living in Kamloops,” Rothenburger said.

Unique in its vision, the Kamloops Project was attracting attention from other media, including CFJC-TV and its sister radio stations B-100 and I-98, as well as CHNL and CBC Radio One out of Kelowna. As they covered the story of the story in the making, Daily News reporters fanned out across the city to meet with people and produce day-in-the-life profiles of participating subjects.

By afternoon, associate new editor Catherine Litt was looking over several pages of incoming documents from the public.

“It’s doing exactly what we wanted it to do, which is to capture Kamloops on an average day and all of the variety of things that go on in people’s lives,” Rothenburger said. “This is what we’re looking for — to collect all of the things that go on in a city.”

People are welcome to continue submitting pictures taken on Tuesday until 5 p.m. today.

“At that point we’ll start putting them on the website.”

A special Kamloops Project edition is in the works, a 40-page supplement to The Daily News on Oct. 30.

“It’s possible that we won’t be able to get all of the submissions in the printed edition, which is why we wanted to do it both ways.”

The Kamloops Project may yet grow to be more than a single experiment in communications and citywide participation, Rothenburger added.

“It started out as a one-time project, but I can see it becoming an annual project based on how people have taken to it.”