You might be already wondering why we haven’t communicated for such a long time and when the first SCIARA experiments will finally start. So here are the most important news:
1. Development team and development status
In February, the composition of our implementation team changed fundamentally. Most of the team members who had designed, developed and tested the system since August 2020 have moved back to projects at their employer companies. Guys, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your commitment!In February, two new team members from our shareholder tarent solutions joined the team. Welcome to our team!
The team now consists of:
- 1.0 Product Owner with about 1 day per week – who formulates the requirements
- 1.5 Software Developer*s
- 1.0 Working Student who also develops
- 0.5 Tester
- Supports members of the first team
As you can imagine, this change in the team as well as the significantly reduced capacity slowed us down a bit at first.
The focus in the last weeks was mainly on training, bug fixing and solving a nasty performance problem that made it impossible to have more than 10 participants. However, this has been solved in the meantime: the latest tests have shown that up to 100 people can now participate at the same time. Meanwhile, work on new features has also picked up.
This situation is one of the reasons why we have not yet started experimenting on a larger scale.
2. Funding applications
We had submitted a funding application to the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt together with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and ETH Zurich in February. We have since received feedback from the reviewers. All four are in favour of funding, but still had a number of questions and comments. We have answered all of them. We are therefore very optimistic that we will receive funding from the DBU. That would finance us continuously in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2021 with the small, perhaps slightly expanded team.We have also decided to submit another application to the EU in the EIC Pathfinder Open Programme with our European partners from Spain, Italy and Slovenia and PIK. We are well into that at the moment. The deadline is 19 May.
In the next few weeks we also expect to hear back on our second EU application, which we submitted in January.In addition, we are in contact with various foundations and other funding institutions.
3. Experiments
We will soon begin the first experiments, initially with participants from among those who supported us as “Early Participant” or as “Citizen Scientist” in the crowdfunding. Information about the dates was sent by email. If you belong to the circle but did not receive the email, please check the spam folder of your email programme.