A whole lot of work was done this week! We are about to begin the actual design phase of our app after 3 whole weeks of validating the scope of our project. To start, we should introduce our team of 8 people from 2 different programs properly!

The full stack development team:

Allison

Kevin

Jin

...and the designing team:

Ben

Sebastian

Henver

Jackie

Anders

Even though we've assigned ourselves to subgroups and tasks, we all capable of working interchangeably for the most part.

Now onto the main update, elaborating on the validation of our work. Our team has completed reaching out to survey several people externally and analyze potential competitors, per requirements with the project timeline. Several key findings regarding user preferences and expectations were uncovered and we were able to draft up consistent values our app should have.

During Wednesday's meeting, we presented our progress, and Henry gave feedback regarding the project’s scope, suggesting we focus directly on wildfires, as tackling all types of disasters would be an overwhelming task. With that in mind, we returned to him on Friday with a revised scope: we are now fully concentrating on the pre-wildfire stage, using a user persona (a fictional character) to map out how and why our app should be used. This persona is also backed by the user surveys we conducted earlier.

Lastly, regarding the sandboxing of potential code, Lighthouse has gotten potential sights on more APIs that would work, and we may be using OpenAI's fine-tuning system to customize our AI to organize data.

That is all the updates for this week, a lot of progress should be set in motion for the app itself in the coming weeks!