What was the OpenID Europe Foundation? A 2007 look back

Please note: this page is a historical retrospective. openideurope.eu is today an independent guide to digital identity and login security in Europe. It has no connection to the former OpenID Europe Foundation or to the OpenID Foundation.

The OpenID Europe Foundation, abbreviated OIDE, was an organisation founded in 2007 to promote the then-new OpenID login standard across Europe. The old website described it as a non-profit international association under Belgian law, based in Brussels, open to European companies and communities. Everything below comes from the archived 2007 to 2009 pages of the original site, checked against later reference sources.

Founding and legal form

The archived foundation page said OIDE was created in June 2007 on the initiative of a single founder to help, promote and protect OpenID in Europe. The bylaws give a slightly different picture: they state that the association was recorded in the Belgian register in November 2007, under the Belgian law of 27 June 1921 on non-profit and international non-profit associations. The legal form was an AISBL, the French-language abbreviation for an international non-profit association. The bylaws were written in French with English translations planned.

The same document says what the body was not. It would not be an identity provider, would not hand out OpenID addresses and would not hold databases of users’ personal data. It was meant as a policy, community and brand body, not a login service. For how OpenID itself worked, see our explainer on OpenID 2.0.

What it wanted to achieve

The mission statement listed about eighteen goals. In plain words they fell into five groups:

• Promotion: make OpenID known to European users, appear at conferences and barcamps, and send press releases.
• Brand and rules: manage the name, logo and policies of OpenID in Europe. The related trademark story is told in The OpenID trademark and logo.
• Lobbying and advice: persuade European companies and public bodies to adopt OpenID, and monitor the digital identity market.
• Community: appoint one representative for each country or language and help set up national chapters.
• Service work: coordinate translations, connect technical people, watch privacy practice and raise money for projects.

The mission also claimed the role of “European voice” of OpenID when the global community had to make big decisions. How far that voice carried is a different question; the standards themselves were written elsewhere, in the OpenID Foundation’s working groups.

The bylaws in outline

The bylaws describe three bodies:

1. Board of Directors: two to five founding members who held the decisive authority, plus one delegate each from the advisory council and the community board. That makes seven people at most.
2. Advisory Council: up to twenty large organisations from technology, telecoms, the internet, finance and public administration, plus independent consultants. Each named a representative. Terms ran for at least two years, with a waiting list if the council was full. A public page described its job as studying commercial, legal, security and regulatory questions around OpenID.
3. Community Board: independent individuals acting as national representatives, or the leaders of an official local association. Terms were two years.

Membership came in four kinds: founding members, advising members who paid an annual fee, community representatives who paid nothing, and sustaining members who gave money or gifts. Admission was decided by the board, which did not have to give reasons for refusing an applicant. Money was to come from dues, donations, event fees, merchandise and public grants. The dissolution clause is a curiosity: it required a three-quarters vote of founding members and said that brand names and domain names contributed by a founder would go back to that founder.

The local chapter model

OIDE’s idea for reach was national chapters. A short “National Chapter Policy” listed fifteen rules. A chapter had to be a non-profit legal entity (with exceptions), register with OIDE and sign an agreement, have at least two people on its leadership team, run its own website, translate key documents, share any intellectual property freely with the community and file an annual activity report in English. OIDE would recognise only one chapter per country, in principle, and could de-list one that ignored the rules for three months after written notice. Chapters were described as legally independent but “under the control” of the Foundation and were to receive funding from it.

In early 2008 the site listed one existing chapter in France, planned chapters in Switzerland, Sweden and Poland and a discussion phase in Portugal. The Swiss chapter was registered in Zurich in June 2008. How the wider community of country representatives worked is covered in The European OpenID community and its local chapters.

Members and advisors

The public members list from February 2008 was short: a handful of small companies from France, Portugal and Ukraine. The advisory board page named no organisations at all and only invited applications. We therefore make no claim about which institutions, if any, ever took a seat. We deliberately do not name individuals from that period.

What became of it

The archive shows the blog active into mid-2009, with new country representatives still being announced. By November 2010 the domain served a generic “for sale” parking page, and a 2011 snapshot shows a thinner, re-themed blog. Meanwhile, the OpenID Foundation kept developing the standards and published OpenID Connect in 2014. We found no public statement from OIDE about closing down, so we do not claim one. The longer story is on What happened to openideurope.eu.

Why it still matters

The episode is a useful case study in identity governance. A technical standard, a trademark, a community and several national bodies all need clear owners. The EU’s current approach with the EU Digital Identity Wallet answers those questions through legislation and public bodies rather than through a private association. For the full sequence of events, see the OpenID timeline. For the present-day standard that carries the name forward, read OpenID Connect explained. The global standards body publishes its own material at the OpenID Foundation.