EVE Online's citizen science feature, Project Discovery, is up for a Webby award. The feature has been nominated for the Best Piblic Service, Activism, and Social Aspect Game in this year's awards.
If you're unfamiliar with Project Discovery, it's a citizen science initiative that has been running in multiple ways for the last few years. Through Project Discovery, players have helped scientists find exoplanets, as well as most recently helped with COVID-19 research over the course of the current ongoing pandemic.
The Webby Awards themselves are heralded as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, so getting nominated for an award here is no small thing. EVE Online's Project Discovery is up for the reward after cataloging nearly 150 hours worth of COVID-19 research as of September of last year.
Via the press release:
"Since June 2020, Project Discovery participants have contributed to a major real-life scientific program that aims to understand the immune system’s response to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). In partnership with teams at MMOS, McGill University, BC Cancer, and front-line COVID-19 clinicians such as Dr. Andrea Cossarizza (Professor of Immunology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia School of Medicine in Italy) – players have been marking cell populations on graphs which help scientists further understand how COVID-19 specifically affects blood cells. With over 115 million submissions made in the past year, players have helped to produce data that would not exist without the efforts of EVE’s dedicated players around the world."
You can vote for Project Discovery, or whichever of the nominees you feel deserves the award, as well as the many of Webby categories in this year's 25th Annual Webby Awards here.
