Our partner MMOS Sarl (Massively Multiplayer Online Science) is based in western Switzerland. It is a major citizen science (CS) innovator that has built an international research pipeline by integrating crowdsourced CS mini-tasks into major videogames. MMOS engaged over 7 million contributors submitting 1 billion+ solutions, making them one of the most active CS platform ever created. The company's projects were awarded the Innovation Award of the University of Geneva, among others, and got praised by hundreds of articles, including The New Yorker, BBC, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and were featured twice on the front-page of Nature Biotechnology. Their two flagship implementations are EVE Online's Project Discovery and Borderlands Science in Borderlands 3.

Based on hundreds of meetings with game companies, we have identified the major roadblock to growing CS even further: the high resource commitment required of major game studios. Our solution is the Play Science mobile platform: a new iOS/Android app that will host several CS mini-games, including the ones of our existing partners. Our objective is to onboard millions of our existing CS contributors to this new platform and invite tens of millions through new partnerships. The platform will revolutionize CS by lowering the barrier to entry for game developers. It will also be more accessible for researchers by removing the need for a 1-to-1 game-research project match. Major well-established CS projects are also ready to collaborate.

Monetizing its user base is key to the long-term sustainability of any platform. However, while mobile apps often apply very aggressive monetization strategies, this would contradict the spirit of the MMOS Play Science initiative. Thus, through conceptual and empirical research, our project will establish the prototype of a monetization model that will be ethical, sustainable, and accepted by our business partners and gaming communities. We plan to follow up on this feasibility study with a more substantial empirical project.

The Zurich Center for Sustainability Leadership at ZHAW School of Management and Law will thus search for preliminary answers to the following interconnected questions:

1. In current business ethics research, what is the state of the art in sustainable and ethical monetization models of digital platforms?
2. What are current best practices regarding sustainable and ethical monetization models of digital platforms?
3. What does the CS community expect when it comes to monetization models being ethical, fair and socially sustainable?