The European OpenID community and its local chapters

The OpenID community in Europe between 2007 and 2009 was a network of volunteers, not a company. It linked developers, students, small web companies and a few researchers who wanted OpenID to work in their own language and country. It was organised under the banner of the OpenID Europe Foundation, a separate Belgian association described in What was the OpenID Europe Foundation?. This page is a historical retrospective. openideurope.eu today is an independent guide with no connection to that community, to the Foundation or to the OpenID Foundation. We deliberately name no individuals.

How the network was built

When the website went live in November 2007, a community page listed 28 countries. The list ran from Austria, Belgium and Bulgaria through Germany, Ireland and Italy to Russia, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. A team page counted sixteen members at that point, each described as the representative for one country. In the bylaws these representatives made up the “community board”, the third body beside the board of directors and the advisory council.

Recruitment continued during 2008 and the old blog announced newcomers with short welcome posts: a university team in Portugal in May, a representative for Hungary in June, Russia in early July, Serbia and Belarus in July, North Macedonia in September, Albania in October and Belgium in June 2009. Each post also listed the countries “still open”, a sign that the network was never complete. In mid-2009 the list of open countries still included Cyprus, Czechia, Croatia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Ukraine and Slovakia.

What a country page contained

Each country had a page on the site with a standard template: a welcome line, events where “smart and friendly people” meet, known OpenID providers in the country, known sites that accept OpenID, and a contact. Many pages stayed nearly empty. The Austrian page is typical in its candour: it said it knew of no popular provider in the country, only some private ones, and no large Austrian web service that accepted OpenID. It pointed instead to barcamps in Vienna on 26 January 2008 and in Klagenfurt on 2 February 2008. The Swiss page was the most complete, in four languages, listing conference talks and a provider.

The pages are a useful snapshot. In 2007, even in countries with strong web scenes, OpenID was something developers talked about rather than something ordinary users met.

Language and profiles

Translation was more than a slogan. Some country pages existed in the local language as well as in English: the Bulgarian and Greek pages, for instance, offered a version in Bulgarian and Greek script, and the Swiss page came in English, German, French and Italian. Not every page went further than a welcome line, but the effort shows what the volunteers saw as their core task: an identity technology only works for people if they can read about it in their own language.

The welcome posts for new representatives followed a pattern. They gave a short profile, typically a student, lecturer, researcher, web entrepreneur or developer, with a line about their work and interests. Several came from universities, and one Portuguese post introduced a whole faculty team rather than a single person. The chapter policy also obliged each national chapter to translate the documents passed down from the European level, which shows how central language was meant to be. We do not repeat the profiles here, but taken together they show a community of technical enthusiasts rather than of companies or officials.

Local chapters

Beyond individual representatives, the Foundation wanted national associations, called chapters. They had to follow a chapter policy of fifteen points, including legal incorporation as a non-profit, a leadership team of at least two, a website and an annual report in English.

• France: the French chapter was founded on 1 June 2007 in Paris under the French association law of 1901 and was the only chapter listed as existing in early 2008.
• Switzerland: the Swiss chapter adopted its bylaws on 9 April 2008 and was registered in Zurich on 10 June 2008.
• Planned or in discussion in 2008: Sweden and Poland as planned chapters, Portugal in a discussion phase.

Because a chapter had to be legally independent, setting one up cost real effort, which may explain why only two reached official status in the archived record.

What the volunteers actually did

The work fell into a few repeating types:

• Translation and explanation: turning English OpenID material into local languages and explaining the idea to site owners.
• Events: barcamps, conference talks and small dinners. A dinner in Berlin on 6 November 2007 gathered a dozen people, including representatives from several countries and a visitor from the United States. More on conferences is in OpenID on tour.
• Provider and adopter watching: noting when a firm launched an OpenID provider, such as Clavid in Switzerland, Telecom Italia in Italy or a Romanian server tied to a government programme, covered in OpenID in government.
• Bridging to eID: a talk at a Basel conference in March 2008 argued that OpenID could widen the use of national electronic ID cards, using Estonia as the example, where the ID card could unlock OpenID logins. Today’s picture for that country is in our Estonia guide and the Swiss background in the Switzerland guide.

What remained

By 2010 the domain served a parking page. The volunteer model had real limits: no visible staff or budget in the public record, and a protocol that was losing ground to social login, as told in Why OpenID 2.0 faded. Still, the community left a few lasting things. It showed that identity standards need local language and local context, a lesson now central to the EU’s cross-border eID work. And it documented, country by country, how early the web was in 2007.

The full sequence of dates is in the OpenID timeline. For the standard as it exists today, see OpenID Connect.