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Life & fun · August 28, 2016

Crowdsourcing academic profiles for 3,600 computer science professors

Drafty - A Smarter web-based spreadsheet for data which allows the maintenance of data to be self-sustaining over time.

Crowdsourcing academic profiles for 3,600 computer science professors launched on August 28, 2016 with 46 votes, #1,656 of 3,856 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.

Visit drafty.cs.brown.edu ↗Alternatives

In plain words

Drafty is a web-based spreadsheet tool that crowdsources and maintains data on computer science professors by recruiting users to review and update information over time. Users can edit entries, add or delete rows, comment, and generate insights from the dataset. The platform keeps academic profiles current through continuous community contribution rather than requiring centralized maintenance.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Drafty strives to keep data up-to-date by recruiting people to review it from the crowd of people already using it. This continual review allows the maintenance of data to be self-sustaining over time. Potential reviewers can freely edit specific data, add new rows, delete rows, comment on rows, and generate sentence-based insights from the data called "Did you know." A new approach to computer science rankings. A meta ranker using real-time data from CS Professors as one of its sources. Shaun Wallace, Lucy van Kleunen, Marianne Aubin-Le Quere, Abraham Peterkin, Yirui Huang, Jeff Huang. HCOMP 2017 [source code] Shaun Wallace, Alexandra Papoutsaki, Neilly H. Tan, Hua Guo, Jeff Huang. CSCW…from drafty.cs.brown.edu

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