Xavier Dutoit

---

Xavier Dutoit
Born	(1971-04-09) 9 April 1971 09/04/1971 Geneva
🏳️ Nationality	Swiss French
💼 Occupation	Civic tech activist, Software engineer
Known for	ECI, Denmarkification

Xavier Dutoit (/ˈzeɪvjər duːtwɑː/ ZAYV-yer doo-TWAH, fr; born 9 April 1971) is a Swiss-French civic tech activist, known for his work in promoting direct democracy and European Citizens' Initiatives (ECIs) and as a creator of the satirical political campaign Denmarkification .

Biography

In 2010, Dutoit co-founded CiviCooP, a Dutch cooperative aimed at meeting the growing demand for CiviCRM and offering better support to customers. The cooperative brought together active CiviCRM community members to collaborate while maintaining their individuality and independence.

Since then he has served as the technology director for several successful ECIs, including campaigns that collected over one million verified signatures, a requirement for the European Commission to consider legislative action. These initiatives include:

• Right2Water (2013), the first ECI to successfully collect over one million signatures, advocating for the recognition of water as a public good.
• Ban Glyphosate (2017), a campaign to prohibit the use of the herbicide glyphosate in the European Union.
• Save Bees and Farmers (2020), an initiative aimed at reducing pesticide use to protect biodiversity and farmers.
• Fur Free Europe (2022), a campaign to ban fur farming and sales in the EU.

Dutoit is a board member of the German non-profit organization "Association for the ECI e.V.", which supports the implementation and improvement of the European Citizens' Initiative process. He is also the initiator of openECI, the only independent, open-source software officially approved by the European Commission for collecting signatures for ECIs. He also served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Innovation Director of WeMove Europe, a progressive campaigning organization.

Hackathons and Civic Tech

Dutoit is an active participant in civic tech hackathons, which aim to develop tools and solutions to enhance transparency and democratic engagement. Notable events include:

• A 2014 hackathon at the European Parliament, where participants worked to make parliamentary data more accessible to the public.
• The DiploHack organized by the Dutch Presidency of the EU in 2016, where Dutoit's team won for developing a tool to track voting patterns in the Council of the European Union.

Satirical activism

At the beginning of 2025, Xavier Dutoit launched the "Denmarkification" campaign, a satirical and humorous online petition proposing the acquisition of California by Denmark. The campaign was born out of a conversation Dutoit overheard during a vacation in the Philippines, where an American discussed U.S. President Donald Trump’s interest in purchasing Greenland . Inspired by this absurd notion of territorial acquisition, Dutoit created the "Denmarkification" petition as a critique of neocolonialism. The campaign gained the attention of Politico, who published a note about it and then went viral with reports in numerous media worldwide.

External links

• Official site

This article "Xavier Dutoit" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Xavier Dutoit. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

📰 Article(s) of the same category(ies)

• Choorian (film franchise)
• Adrian Pisarello
• Dalip Tahil
• Yorkshire Brewhouse
• D. A. Kalpaja
• Democrat Party (Peru, Nicolini)
• Shanta Apte

---