PORTRAIT - Xavier Damman is the kind of guy that forgets his iPhone on the train from Antwerp to Brussels. But he’s also the kind of geek that makes a revolution. Online.

When we wrote to arrange a meeting with Xavier Damman, he replied to meet “at 12pm-ish” in front of the Spinelli entrance of the European Parliament. He arrived 45 minutes late with a big suitcase, a jacket twice his size and a bottle of water slipped in the external pocket of his black rucksack.

A young Belgian face with a large smile and two wide open blue eyes, Xavier Damman was born 26 years ago in Nivelles – a Belgian city of 26.000 people-, he studied Computer Science at Leuven University and at the Technical University of Madrid. He finally moved to California in 2009 with his girlfriend and no money to start his business (and pay the rent).

{ PLUS } Here you can find a Storify about his adventure Brussels-San Francisco: the very beginning of his project.

He had already created Publitweet when he had the idea of launching  Storify. “It’s easy to get lost in the feed of Twitter and I wanted to develop an instrument to filter the best posts and to create a new story composed by peoples’ voices”, explains Xavier.

A country for geek men

After a first investment of 10.000 dollars, he finds a partner, Burt Herman, a journalist who worked for the American press agency Associated Press. Together they raise a venture capital of 2 million dollars: the dream comes true.

{ PLUS } You can have a look at how we followed the Barroso State of the Union speech in Strasbourg, or the stories of the Washington Post, the White House or the coverage of an independent journalist of the Oslo explosion. Check also The Stream, the TV show of Al Jazeera based on Storify technology.

User-friendly, powered by drag&drop technology and minimalist design, Storify is become the most used tool of “social curation“. It’s like collecting shells on the beach or in the internet ocean: you can choose a video from Youtube, some tweets, one post from Tumblr, a page or Facebook comments, a website and a photo gallery from Flickr. Once you have picked the right elements, you can create a timeline to make your story. At the moment, Storify counts 8 employees, 50.000 users and is “still looking for a business plan”.

If you’re going…

No, no flowers in your hairs. No orgies and drugs. No Jim Morrison and no Joan Didion. If you’re going to San Francisco today you’re going to “the world capital of the web industry”. As Xavier did. “It was really easy to get in touch with CEOs and advisors. People are open and interested to listen to new projects and ideas. If I had to give a message to Europe it would be to open its doors to young people. I think CEOs should take one hour every month to meet young businessmen”.

Hackers love politics

Before flying to the US, Xavier founded Europatweets, a European platform that connects citizens with politics and “promotes better and more transparent communication between voters and Members of Parlament through open conversation”.

Following in this direction, last year he launched a new project: HackDemocracy. “I created this site to motivate hackers to use their time and skills to improve democracy. Hackers and politics speak different languages: they don’t understand each other, but they are part of the same world”, explains Xavier. But things are changing in Brussels. On the 8th and 9th of November the Hack4Transparency event will take place in the European Parliament.

{ PLUS } It will be the first-ever ‘hackathon’ within the premises of European Parliament. The location aims to reinforce the symbolic value of uniting the European Institutions with the Internet and the hackers. It also puts the European Parliament at the forefront of innovative legislators in the digital rights arena.

“A new digital society is born and that makes it an historical moment comparable only to the invention of paper. In this society hackers are the only ones who master the new tools” explains Xavier. The goal of the event is to get together talented European developers to facilitate the co-creation of tools based on existing code and data sources within a 24 hours.

> > Photo by mbargo.be