OpenID on tour in Europe: Le Web, FSCONS, Net-ID, Jazoon

Between December 2007 and June 2008 the European OpenID community used conferences, dinners and barcamps to explain a new idea: log in once, anywhere, without a new password per site. The archived blog of the original openideurope.eu site recorded four events worth revisiting. This is a historical retrospective. The site you are reading today is an independent guide with no connection to the OpenID Foundation or the former OpenID Europe Foundation, and we do not name the speakers.

Le Web, Paris: 11 and 12 December 2007

Le Web is a large annual Paris conference on internet start-ups. According to the community blog, a group met for dinner on the evening after the conference ended to talk about OpenID 2.0 and its development in Europe. The attendees represented the global OpenID project, a Mozilla organisation in Europe, the European association and the French chapter. It was a small meeting, but it came about a week after the 2.0 specification was approved, which is described in December 2007: OpenID Authentication 2.0 is approved.

FSCONS, Sweden: 7 and 8 December 2007

FSCONS is a Scandinavian conference on free software, culture and society. A speaker was invited to talk about OpenID and demonstrated how it can work with a USB hardware authentication token from the Swedish company Yubico. The slides were published as a PDF. The idea was ahead of its time: a physical key that proves that you are present, combined with a login you control. It is the ancestor of today’s hardware security keys and of the FIDO standards. A related event is told in 2008: OpenID meets the YubiKey.

Net-ID 2008, Basel: 3 and 4 March 2008

Net-ID was billed as the fourth annual European conference on “Identity, Trust, Privacy and Security in Europe”. It took place at a hotel in Basel and drew speakers and delegates from across Europe and from the United States, Japan and Korea. The topics included national eID projects, user-centric identity management, federation, privacy and cross-border alliances, and OpenID.

According to the community’s own report, the OpenID delegation came from several countries: representatives of the European association, Estonia, Japan and Switzerland. The talk that got most attention described OpenID and e-government in Estonia, where citizens could use their national ID card to log in not only to local government services but to any website around the world that supported OpenID. Many participants, the report says, were surprised that OpenID could increase the use of eID cards without complicated federation protocols. Our own country guides pick up that thread today; see Estonia and Switzerland, or the EU view in cross-border eID.

Jazoon 08, Zurich: 23 to 26 June 2008

Jazoon was an international conference on Java technology. A talk on 24 June was titled “OpenID – User-centric Identity Management for Java Applications”. It was given by the Swiss chapter’s representative together with the technology chief of Clavid, the Swiss provider introduced in Clavid, Switzerland’s first OpenID identity provider. This was a developer audience, so the pitch was about libraries and implementation rather than about trust.

A fifth thread: barcamps and dev camps

The country pages listed smaller community events. Barcamps in Vienna on 26 January 2008 and in Klagenfurt on 2 February 2008 were meant as meeting points for people interested in web development and OpenID. An “OpenIDDevCamp” at the San Francisco offices of Six Apart, inspired by barcamps and hack days, aimed to OpenID-enable as many public sites as possible over a weekend in January; the old post’s headline gives the year as 2007, but it was published in December 2007, so the event was most likely in January 2008. These meetings show the community’s working style: informal, open to anyone and aimed at shipping code. More on the volunteer network is in The European OpenID community and its local chapters.

What the events tell us

First, in 2007 and 2008 OpenID was sold mainly as convenience and user control: fewer passwords, more choice of provider. The stronger security ideas, hardware tokens and eID cards, were present but secondary. Second, the audience was small and technical. Third, the same questions came back that dominate identity debates now: who vouches for a person online, and how do users stay in control? Those questions are answered today with OpenID Connect and, in Europe, with the EU Digital Identity Wallet. The OpenID timeline places each event in the wider sequence.