OpenID and the Belgian eID in 2009: an unfinished link

In June 2009 the OpenID Europe blog welcomed a new Belgian representative. The post is short, and it is one of the last items before the blog fell silent, but it raises an interesting question that the archive does not fully answer: could the Belgian electronic ID card have been the strong login that OpenID needed?

What the post says

The announcement of 11 June 2009 introduced a professor of computer science at a Belgian university who had spent ten years, from 1998 to 2008, as a consultant, mainly on identity management, implementation and interoperability. The research interest named was information-system security, in particular identity management in web applications. The post added one concrete detail: he was working on the implementation of an OpenID identity provider and hoped to use it as a basis for more advanced services.

Like all similar posts, it ended with a list of countries where membership was still open. In June 2009 Belgium had just dropped off that list. Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Ukraine and Slovakia were still open.

Belgium, the homeland that came late

The oddity is that the organisation itself was Belgian. The OpenID Europe Foundation had been set up in Brussels in 2007 as an international non-profit association under Belgian law, as described in What was the OpenID Europe Foundation?. Yet in the 2008 lists of countries without a representative, Belgium appeared again and again, and the contact came only in mid-2009. Having a legal address in Brussels did not create a Belgian user community.

The eID card: strong credential, awkward login

Belgium was ahead of most countries on electronic ID. Citizens had been issued a chip-based identity card since the early 2000s, and the card could be used to sign in and sign documents. In 2009 that seemed a perfect fit for OpenID: let the identity provider ask for the card, and the user gets a strong login that works at every OpenID site.

The problem was practical. Using the card on a computer required a card reader, driver software and a PIN, and in 2009 few people had a reader at home. Clavid, the Swiss provider described in Clavid, Switzerland’s first OpenID provider, tried similar ideas with smart cards and client certificates. The lesson was the same: strong credentials worked, but only for those willing to set them up.

We want to be careful here. The archive does not say that the Belgian representative’s provider used the eID card, and we found no documentation of a finished service. The connection between the eID and OpenID in this page is the opportunity the two shared, not a documented project.

What Belgium did next

Belgium followed another path. The country relied on its eID card and on the federal authentication service, and in 2017 the private itsme app arrived, which lets people confirm logins and signatures from a phone without a reader. MyGov.be, launched in 2024, is meant to become the government wallet and the country’s EU wallet. For the current state of play, read Digital ID in Belgium.

The pattern is telling. The reader problem that held back the eID card was solved by moving the credential to the phone, which is the same idea behind the EU Digital Identity Wallet. Whether such a wallet can be recognised across borders is the subject of cross-border eID.

Reading the 2009 post today

The Belgian entry is a small coda. By mid-2009 the large providers had joined OpenID, Facebook’s login was growing, and OpenID Europe’s activity faded. The sequence is in the OpenID timeline, and the technical background is in OpenID 2.0.

The facts about the 2009 announcement come from the archived blog post. Facts on Belgian eID and itsme are general background, current as of October 2026.