The problem
Japanese neighborhood associations — jichikai or chonaikai — run almost entirely on volunteer labor. Someone collects dues house by house. Someone else delivers the bulletin board. Another person organizes the safety drill, coordinates the annual meeting, and writes the handover notes for whoever takes over next year.
None of that work gets logged anywhere. It's invisible. So when officer recruitment comes around, no one wants to step up — not because the work is impossible, but because no one knows how much of it there actually is, and the person who did it last year is already tired. The same people cycle through exhaustion. The same conversation happens every year.
What Musubiba does
Musubiba makes every officer's contribution measurable. Bulletin circulation, dues collection, safety check-ins, meeting votes, annual scheduling, and handover documentation — all tracked, all visible, all handed off cleanly when roles rotate.
The goal isn't automation. It's making the workload legible so that it can be shared more fairly, and so that new officers aren't starting from zero every cycle. The handover notes feature matters more than you'd expect: a successor who inherits a full activity record behaves differently than one starting from a blank slate.
Technical choices
Flutter for iOS and Android — neighborhood associations span every device type, and a single Dart codebase was the only realistic path. Backend is Firebase; Firestore's real-time listeners handle safety check-ins and live vote tallies. Billing runs on both Stripe and in-app purchases to cover the web-based accounting input path, because some committee leads are more comfortable with a browser than a smartphone. New members join by scanning a QR code — no invite emails to manage.
Honest caveat
This is optimized specifically for Japan's jichikai system. The workflows — how bulletins circulate, how dues are collected, how officer roles are defined — are Japan-specific enough that it won't map well to HOAs in other countries. We chose depth over generality.
Pricing: free up to 15 members; ¥1,500/month for unlimited.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/musubiba/id6759871374
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.htor.musubiba
