Dear @kgatman,
First of all, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to share your perspective, for the tone and approach of your message, and for the valuable inputs that strongly align with our thinking and strategy.
It was particularly interesting to see how we share a similar “love story” with DHIS2. I fell in love with how easy it was to set up an information system using such a rich metadata-driven configuration model after spending four years developing a custom reporting information system.
As Max pointed out, your vision aligns with several aspects of the HISP Center Strategy 2026–2028:
- Strategic Objective 1: Reinforce and enhance DHIS2 as a durable, adaptable platform underpinning national information systems and enabling innovation across sectors
- Strategic Objective 3: Enable effective country use of AI for better decision making.
Strategic Objective 1 focuses on strengthening and maintaining the core use case of DHIS2 (aggregate reporting), while Strategic Objective 3 pushes us to explore innovative yet robust ways to support end users throughout the data collection and use journey. Not only for data analysis, as you highlighted, but also for data collection, where everythign starts and where important challenges still exist today.
In response, and in alginment to the HIPS Center Stragegy (which scope is broader that platform development alone), the Strategic Priorities for the DHIS2 platform guide the roadmap.
- Improved functionality to maintain & sustain high quality DHIS2 implementations.
- Better support for interoperability, extensibility, and local innovation.
- Increased support for good systems architecture.
Strategic Priority 1 reinforces the need to keep DHIS2 robust and reliable for existing implementations. Strategic Priority 2 adresses the need to focuss on a smaller core and foster extensibility and local innovation, recognising the importance of enabling external development, and Strategic Priority 3 would be a natural place to prioritize AI support for data analysis.
I thought you would appreciate some context on how we guide the DHIS2 platform, since your suggestions clearly align with these priorities.
That said, withing the DHIS2 core team we tend to move more slowly than the broader tech industry. Major shifts such as reverting decissions (like tracker being standalone module) or reshaping long term direction (like shifting to fostering extensibility in backend development), require significant resources and coordination to ensure a robust and reliable core.
I think you would gladly find out find out that your proposals are shared and welcome within the core team if this was a coffee break somewhere instead of a CoP post 
Maintaining a balance between an ambitious vision and a realistic approach is fundational for us. Posts and inputs like yours are extremely useful and appreciated, as they help us keep that vision ambitious.