FAQ
What this is, who writes it, and why some answers are blank.
The short version
What is Workspace Nomad?
Reviews of coffee shops written around one question: can you actually do the thing you came to do here? Meet somebody, study, work on a laptop, read. Every shop gets a roast — the knock — and a toast — the praise. Both, always. Nowhere is uniformly good and nowhere is uniformly bad.
Why is so much of it blank?
Because nobody has been in to check yet, and we would rather say so. Most shops arrive here from open map data knowing little more than their name and where they are. A blank field means unknown, never no— and the difference matters: “we have no record of the wifi” and “there is no wifi” would send you to very different places.
I filtered for outlets and got a section at the bottom saying data was unavailable. Why?
Those are shops nothing ruled out, but which have no recorded answer for something you asked about. They are not matches and they are not rejects, so they sit apart with the missing criteria named on each card. Dropping them would have been the easy option and the wrong one: on a freshly imported city it would hide almost everything behind two checkboxes, and a hidden shop looks exactly like one we checked and ruled out.
Where are the opening hours?
There are none, on purpose. Hours change faster than a crowdsourced record can follow them — a café quietly stops opening on Sundays and there is no event to notice — so a confident hours filter would send you to a closed shop with the site’s word behind it. Check the shop’s own listing before you set off.
Reviews
Who can write one?
Anyone with an account. Reviewing is the one contribution open to every signed-in visitor, and it has to be: prices, how busy it is and how hard it is to get a seat can only be refreshed by somebody standing in the shop.
Do I have to answer everything?
No — and please do not guess. Every question on the review form is optional and blank means “I didn’t notice”. Blank never overwrites what is already on record, so skipping the pricing section cannot wipe the prices somebody else read off the board.
I wrote a roast and the shop still says something else. Why?
Your review is published as written and kept forever. What it changes on the shop’s summary depends on the field: things you observed — prices, seating, amenities, whether you would recommend it for studying — update the shop straight away. The shop’s headline roast and toast are the site’s editorial line and a contributor decides those. Your review says which of your answers went where, right after you post it.
Can I review a shop that isn't listed?
Search for it on the New Review page. If it is in the open map data we have imported for your city, it will appear in the second group of results. A contributor can add it and review it in one go; anyone else can put it forward, and it becomes reviewable once a contributor has looked at it.
Lists
What are Your Lists for?
Where you mean to go — which is a different question from where you have been. Press Saveon any shop. Lists are private unless you turn on “anyone with the link”, because a list of places you plan to be is not ours to publish.
Contributing
What is a contributor?
Somebody trusted to edit shops directly rather than only through reviews: adding a place, correcting an address, writing the roast and toast, linking locations to a chain. Contributors are vouched for by other contributors and approved by an admin.
How do I become one?
Ask one. A contributor puts your name forward and an admin approves it. There is no application form, deliberately — the referral is the check.
Something is wrong. How do I fix it?
If it is something you can see on a visit — a price, the seating, whether the wifi works — post a review saying so and it updates the shop. For anything else, a contributor needs to make the edit.
Where the data comes from
Who supplies the places?
Names, addresses and coordinates come from open datasets that allow their data to be kept and built on: Overture Maps (places theme, CDLA-Permissive-2.0 and Apache-2.0), Foursquare Open Source Places (Apache-2.0), Wikidata (CC0) for the chains, the Name Suggestion Index (BSD-3-Clause) for brand names, and city open-data portals where the city publishes with no rights reserved. Every shop keeps its upstream identity, so a correction made there can reach us.
What about OpenStreetMap?
We use it, carefully. OSM is under the Open Database License, which is share-alike: build a database out of it and that database inherits the same terms. We would rather choose the licence for our own writing, so OSM is no longer what the shop list is built from — that comes from the permissive datasets above.
So where does OpenStreetMap data show up?
As extra detail on a shop that is already listed. Their notes on things like wifi and outdoor seating are kept in a separate table and read only when we have no answer of our own, and anything shown that way is labelled “per OpenStreetMap” — nobody here has verified it. Keeping the two apart, rather than merging OSM into our records, is what lets both licences stand: theirs on their data, ours on ours. Their data is available under the ODbL.
And the opinions?
Ours. The roast, the toast, how competitive the seating is, whether a place is any good for a professional meeting — that is original observation by the people who wrote it, not map data.
Why not Google?
Google’s Places terms forbid keeping the data for more than 30 days and forbid showing it on a non-Google map. “Pull a city, curate it, keep the result” is exactly the thing those terms rule out, and this site draws its own map. The open datasets we use let us keep what we import and license our own work as we choose.
Why does it ask which city I'm in?
Coverage is by metro area: place data is imported city by city, and searching without one would mean scanning the planet to find a café two miles away. Pick a city from under the wordmark; the choice sticks.