dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jørn Braa <jornbraa@xxxxxxxxx>]

hello, we are many who have discussed naming - and branding.

first: today nobody would call their new venture International
Business Machines, because it doesn't depict anything going on in the
world today. However, the reason why IBM is not changing their name is
not related to the hidden meaning of the acronym, but because the
biggest asset they have is their name, i.e. three letters making up
the logo.

So what is our biggest asset in terms of "branding"? Undoubtedly the
acronym DHIS

So to give that away is not exactly smart.

Furthermore, the term "district" is more than an administrative or
geographical identifier, it depicts the historically core health
policy process (or "business area") from which DHIS emerged.

However, HealthMapper is also a well established brand name.

So what you suggest is to give up two well established brand names and
replace them by a new construct.

Well, its difficult to construct "de facto" brand names. I dont really
see the Indians getting exited over changing the brand name to an
african game, although, of course, if they look it up in wikipedia and
apply their abilities for abstract thinking they might understand the
rationale.

However, in times of mergers, post merger naming is the biggest issue.
Recently the most well-known Norwegian brand name (Hydro) gave in to
the "top-down" soviet union style brand name, and became Statoil
(stupid if you ask me, but its not difficult to sell oil).

So in times of mergers, a new label for DHIS may be needed, and as we
have discussed multiple times; HealthMapper is a descriptive term and
cannot cover more than exactly that. Districts, if taken out of the
acronym, is also only part of the story.

OpenHealth was better as a name, I think, but when I suggested to
Thies at WHO to change to OpenHealth he found it stupid, because
"district" is the key issue.

Why not keep names as they appear and try establish an overall label
as e.g. OpenHealth?

Or the game name (forgotten what it was!)

But I agree to a new label - tired of selling a "product" (multiple
names would have solved that!)

jorn

On 11/13/09, Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> There has from time to time been discussions about the branding of our
> software. It has been pointed out by many that the current name is far too
> restrictive: We are not building just a District system, and it is not only
> targeted to Health data, i.e. DHIS is really a misnomer.
>
> As you also know, we also see the software as a possible successor of
> HealthMapper (which has lead to the suggestion of OpenHealthMapper).
> However, that branding may also in fact be too restrictive, in that it again
> narrows things down to Health and skews it unduly towards Mapping, which is
> just a tiny bit of the overall functionality.
>
> Jason and I were just discussing the issue of too restrictive naming, and he
> came up with the well known African game where seeds/beads are placed in
> pits, which goes under a range of names:
> *Awari, Mancale, Ayo* (Yoruba <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language>
> ), *Awalé* (Côte d'Ivoire<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B4te_d%27Ivoire>
> ), *Wari* (Mali <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali>), *Ouri, Ouril or Uril*
>  (Cape Verde <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Verde>), *Warri*
> (Caribbean), *Adji* (Ewe <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewe_language>), and *
> Awélé* (Ga <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga_language>), according to
> Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware>I thought it was quite a nicely fitting
> name, especially thinking of Jørn's famous pic from Sierra Leone:
> http://www.openhealthconsortium.org/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=sl_stones_.jpg
>
> Knut
>
>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Knut Staring
>