Basque mailing-list turns 10

Ten years ago, in a day like today, I found a service called Makelist while surfing the web. Create and manage your own mailing lists! This needs to be tried immediatly, I thought. I needed a motive (build the list around some topic) and some email addresses to add. Ok, some friends from my hometown Eibar. And Eibartarrak (Eibarreans, or so) was thus created, with this introductory message and thread, a mailing list with very simple moderation rules (you introduce yourself with name and surname, archives are public, discussion is in Basque).
   
It was not the 1st Basque-language list (there was one from 1996 that later disappeared), neither the 1st Basque list of the web: Basque-L, which was mainly in English, was born in some Listserv machine of New York in 1993. I was a subscriber to that list for several years, but I have lost contact, I don't even know if Basque-L is alive and if it is, if there's any practical way to subscribe, check its archives... Other Basque-language lists have been created over the past years, but of the surviving ones, Eibartarrak is the veteran, and it's also probably the most lively and interesting one.
   
The Eibartarrak mailing-list has been the basis of all my Internet activities over the last ten years. My company, my everyday work of today, raised from contacts made in the list. My confidence in the Internet as a communication and social tool has its roots in this list: we the users are the agents of change in this era.

Makelist evolved into eGroups which evolved into Yahoogroups. It's a fascinating story. However, we escaped from that locked-in environement, migrated the list to a Mailman-based platform (localised in Basque), and ported the archives to Gmane.

Eibar.org, this website, was created with the effort of listmembers. The 1st Basque-language blog community of the web was born here, pushed by listmembers, in 2004. As for the future, no doubts about the direction: to infinity and beyond. There will be tools to guide us in that navigation too. Some listmembers will meet this afternoon to hack the TomTom car navigation system and record Basque voices for the devices. And that will be made public afterwards.