For a fun side project, I decided to use Google Sheets as a database that would be easily editable by the general public (non-developers).

It is currently populating data for a crowdsourced map of San Francisco Bay Area third-wave coffee roasters:

https://hdehal.github.io/coffee-maps

I was able to quickly get the app created in React, and while Google Sheets has extensive API docs (https://developers.google.com/sheets/api), I found it far easier to use the simplified Node.js wrapper from https://github.com/theoephraim/node-google-spreadsheet

On occasion, I'll get a friendly "request for access" with someone adding a roaster to the list (and the map gets populated automatically), so it's fairly hands-off.