Adding new sites should be easier. I get that this is a tradeoff between rapid engagement and trust, but since the project is so new it's vastly more likely that a visitor will want to add something as opposed to successfully looking it up.
Maybe the focus on cities, while great for the lookup scenario, should not play such a big role when adding data points. My suggestion: just open it up, have a form where any member can add a coffee shop, at any location (Google Maps-powered). As site admins you could review the submissions later and sort it out.
For example, I was initially motivated to add some places near me. That's in Germany, so no cities there yet. This means I've got to jump through the hoop of adding a city, at which point any user who was previously excited about adding stuff to the database becomes stranded and loses interest. I would like to add sites in different cities, so technically I would have to open up requests for 3 cities - in a sparsely populated area like Germany that's not feasible. I'm more interested in how far away a location is than what city it is in.
could you just your favorites here ? i was in germany in 2007 and 2010 for a total of 5 weeks and didn't find a single coffee shop that was conducive to working. thinking it's time to go visit friends again ...
That depends on what you're looking for, locally. Starbucks is always a pretty good option in Germany, but of course shops have varying levels of noise and connectivity.
The Starbucks in Frankfurt near the old stock exchange is pretty good if you can get a place at the big table it's even office-like, and generally shared by people doing the same thing. The Starbucks in Heidelberg works for me, but it's relatively small. There are also several non-chained coffee shops in these cities where you can feel right at home.
Also, if you're ever in Austria, Vienna is absolutely beautiful for coffee shop work.
The secret to finding these things in Germany is to know they come in clusters. For example, Berlin, Frankfurt and Heidelberg are pretty decent and you can find several nice coffee shops there. Find cities that are somewhat cosmopolitan, because size is a bad predictor for coffee shop density here. In between there are vast stretches of absolutely nothing, but then again distances in Germany are generally ridiculously small even though Germans don't think so.
Maybe the focus on cities, while great for the lookup scenario, should not play such a big role when adding data points. My suggestion: just open it up, have a form where any member can add a coffee shop, at any location (Google Maps-powered). As site admins you could review the submissions later and sort it out.
For example, I was initially motivated to add some places near me. That's in Germany, so no cities there yet. This means I've got to jump through the hoop of adding a city, at which point any user who was previously excited about adding stuff to the database becomes stranded and loses interest. I would like to add sites in different cities, so technically I would have to open up requests for 3 cities - in a sparsely populated area like Germany that's not feasible. I'm more interested in how far away a location is than what city it is in.
Also, you should make use of the browser Geo API.