2017, Overcoming New Challenges

This has been a special year for the PuntuEUS Foundation, since this has seen the launching of the PuntuEUS 2020 strategy prepared last year. Four targets were defined in the framework of this strategy, which have served as the goals we aimed at in 2017, marking important milestones all year long.

The development of the .EUS domain improved in 2017: it has now grown over and above expectations, achieving a 21 % average. We can thus say that not only has the project grown stable; rather, it is also strengthening the Basque digital community and is on the way to attaining the objectives set for 2020: we aspire to convert .EUS into the third reference domain in the Basque Country and are in a position to achieve this.

The following objectives attained by the PuntuEUS Foundation in 2017 may be underscored:

·      Decreased domain price: The growth of the .EUS community has facilitated a decrease in its cost. Thus, at the start of 2017, we were able to lower the price of .EUS domains for all users.

·      PuntuEus Foundation has a new chairman: The employers’ association has appointed Iñaki Goirizelaia as chairman, taking over from Joan Mari Torrealdai.

·      The domain growth rate this year reached 21 %, 10 times more than the other domains present in the Basque Country.

·      We have begun important projects to strengthen Euskera in the digital environment: LehenHitza.eus, Tori.eus and Labur.eus, among others.

·      We have promoted community cooperation, celebrating Internet Day in Euskera on 17 May and organising the annual assembly of the ICANN GeoTLD Group in Bilbao.

·      The Sarean.eus website has expanded to radio, with the collaboration of Euskadi Irratia and Euskaltel.

·      To involve the youth in the .EUS project, we have signed an agreement with the UPV/EHU and Mondragon Unibertsitatea facilitating free .EUS domains to students from these universities.

These were some of the activities we undertook in 2017, but there have been many others. It would not have been possible to achieve all this without the help of the PuntuEUS community, whose collaboration also rely on for 2018, in order to continue increasing and consolidating the presence of Euskera in the digital world.