The story of mymizu web - how a community can create waves
“Have we considered taking mymizu open-source?”
It was a casual Monday evening, we (mymizu tech team) were doing our usual catchup when Lawrie (our in-house Thor + CTO) sprung us with a sentence that would end up triggering a really exciting chain of events - eventually culminating in a new product, new community and a new way of progressing mymizu forward.
Let’s go down memory lane
For the past 3 years, mymizu has been harnessing the power of technology and community to tackle single-use plastic waste and encourage people to think and act on the environment in their everyday lives. Now it was time to open up the building of the mymizu platform to the global tech community to see what magic that brings.
mymizu’s app has helped people to track the reduction of more than 600,000+ plastic bottles, crowdsource more than 200,000+ public refill spots, and also onboard nearly 2300 “mymizu Refill Partners” (participating shops and businesses) in Japan and around the world.
We have held challenges for companies as well as cities to help their employees/residents to incorporate a more sustainable lifestyle, and we have even reached #1 on the Apple App store and been Apple App of the Day, twice!
Tech for sustainability works. We have experienced it firsthand. And we knew that it was time to take the next step.
After many internal discussions with Shane Reustle (Japan’s resident open-source expert and mymizu supporter), we all agreed that going open-source would be a natural next step in mymizu’s tech journey.
mymizu web
And so our team, which included Lawrie, Annie, Anna, Mariko, and yours truly - excited yet nervous about this new project - put our heads down and got to work.
We thought that a web version of mymizu would be the perfect way to kick off this project. We decided this for a few key reasons.
Awareness
Since our launch, mymizu’s 200,000+ public refill spots and 2300 “mymizu Refill Partners” (participating shops and businesses) have been accessible only through the mymizu mobile apps (Android and iOS).
It was time to change that.
Free water refills should be accessible to everyone, whether they have an app or not!
Our refill partners should be easily able to share and promote their involvement with the sustainability movement by having their own dedicated webpage and URL
Promoting the concept of co-creation for sustainability becomes easier for governments, universities, and companies if there is a quick way to showcase the reach and impact of mymizu
Community
Being a crowdsourced initiative, the community has underpinned mymizu’s growth since we launched. They are adding refill spots in the parks near them, or asking their favorite cafe to sign up with us. Refill partners are spreading the word and promoting sustainable initiatives through their involvement with us. They are the ones saving plastic bottles and raising the number that we proudly show front and center on our app. There is no denying it. mymizu’s success lies in community. Our community of refill partners, our users, and our team. We are always committed to finding ways to involve as many people as possible to help us kick plastic in the butt!
We have had so many talented software engineers reaching out and asking how they could contribute their skills. So we wanted to find a way for them to contribute directly to building a more sustainable alternative to single-use plastic. By going open source, we can enable anyone from any corner of the world to help improve this platform that has grown into something much bigger than we ever imagined.
Sustainability
The goal is to be sustainable. For us today, and also for the generations to come.
It also means being able to keep our systems sustainable and up-to-date.
Since we don’t have dedicated app developers on our team, we’re limited in our capacity to experiment with new features or ideas and release them quickly or as often as we’d like.
With web and open source, we can iterate on ideas and see our impact in real time! It means our systems will always be fresh, fun to use, and continue to push people towards building more sustainable habits!
mymizu open source hackathon
With help from some friends along the way
Shane (who made Japan’s open-source COVID tracker) was one of the original supporters of this idea, and he and his team at Strata were kind enough to offer their support and guide us through our first experience as well.
And once we kicked off and started sharing this idea around, we had interest and support from many organizations we had collaborated with in the past. The community came through. The passionate people at TBWA\Hakuhodo joined us to provide some beautiful UI designs for the platform.
Some amazing UI mockups prepared for the hackathon
And finally, having done API challenges before with their student cohorts, we teamed up with the Code Chrysalis team to organize the hackathon. They offered us their amazing working spaces and many CC students and teachers also joined the event.
When we put a call out for volunteers for this event - we thought that even if 1-2 people joined us, we would be really lucky, but we ended up welcoming 11 awesome and passionate engineers who joined us for a hackathon to build out some of the core features in a matter of hours.
The fun begins
Our hackathon participants came together in the morning. When 20 people come together on a Sunday morning to build something for our planet, the energy in that room is unexplainable. Everyone was buzzing, excited, and itching to get their hands on the keyboards.
Briefings and talking about the story of mymizu
A set of quick presentations followed. Mariko talked about how mymizu started, what our goals are and what we have been able to achieve. Then I explained the purpose of mymizu open source and why we chose to create a web version of mymizu, explaining the feature roadmap and designs. And finally followed by a very unique analogy of comparing this open source project to an open-sea voyage by me, which was very well received (trust me, it was not cringe at all) Lawrie closed out the intro by going into the technicalities of the API and set up.
Since we wanted to focus on the hackathon to be productive, our team took the decision to pre-decide a set of features that we believed our MVP needed. These included:
Searching for a location to see all the nearby spots (something that has been missing on our app)
Making the site bilingual (English and Japanese)
Being able to sort and filter the map
Showing our community metrics live
Hacking starts as people choose the features they want to work with!
The teams then split up according to the different features they were interested in building. Of course, since it was a mymizu event, we wouldn’t let it get boring. Throughout the day we had lo-fi music, pizza for lunch, and many many mizu hydration breaks (in reusable bottles, of course!). We even had a special visitor who re-energized everyone (we will forgive the fact that they didn’t do any coding).
the goodest boi came to support the volunteers
Show and tell
Time passes by when you’re having fun, and we were shocked to realize that it was already time to showcase the results. We would be lying if we said we didn’t have high expectations, but our team was truly blown away by the speed and professionalism of our participants. Building entire localization frameworks, or search functionality in a day is not easy. But our participants managed it anyway.
demo time
We ended the session with some Radio Taiso (because why not!). It was my first time doing it too. Got to know about some interesting Japanese Culture that day.
When it was time to leave, we didn’t let our hardworking volunteers go empty-handed, there were lots of mymizu t-shirts and stickers to go around.
I’m sure the participants had as much fun as the mymizu team, but don’t take it from us, let’s see what they had to say -
“Great! Very inspiring, very well organized, and a lot of diversity from people, their backgrounds, etc. Everyone felt very welcomed!”
“This is my first hackathon event and I feel welcomed and supported throughout the event. Thank you for making it happen.”
The big release!
Well in hackathons, usually once they end, everyone packs up and goes home, but that was never the plan for this one. Some of the participants even went home to polish up their code and submit it to our codebase. Over the next few weeks, Lawrie and Shane’s team started approving these submissions and so the MVP was ready. We launched within the next month.
The actual mymizu web MVP live in production!
From an idea in May to releasing the MVP in July. It was an amazing ride. But it’s only the beginning.
You can see it in all its glory here - mymizu web app
What’s next?
We always knew that we wanted to make these hackathons a recurring thing. And so we are excited to announce that the date for the next one is fixed! It will be on 11th March 2023! We are super excited to be hosting it at the Code Chrysalis workspace again and are excited to see new and old friends return to help improve mymizu web even further. Now that we have a foundation to work with, there is a lot more freedom to build fun and creative things.
For example
Sorting and filtering the spots on the map
Be able to share rich previews of refill spots on social media
Help a mymizu user find their nearest spots
Track the weather and give an alert if there is a possibility of a heatstroke
Count the number of spots in a specific region
Squash some sneaky bugs
… and anything else you can think of, we are all ears
If this sounds like something that you are interested in, be sure to check out the hackathon signup page here
Keep in touch
If you are interested in to explore mymizu, here are some links to help you get started
If you are not an engineer, but still wish to support us, there are many ways to do so -
You can check out this page for more information on what action you can take to help make sustainability a norm in Japan.
On a concluding note
Solving sustainability can be hard and frustrating, but our source of inspiration is the amazing contributions and involvement of the community which is integrated into everything we do. Each person’s contribution and initiative have a direct impact on improving our planet, and for that, we thank you all. Thank you for making mymizu happen.
With love,
mymizu
the dream team 💧
About the author
Tanmay is mymizu’s product person. He has been volunteering with mymizu for the past two years and has been a core part of the mymizu tech team working on constantly improving the app and web products.
When he is not dreaming new ideas or prioritizing the backlog, he is busy making water themed playlists for the team - which according to him is his most impactful contribution to mymizu.