Who, what and why.
My name is Jeremy Iggers, and I am the creator of Global Twin Cities. Exploring other countries and cultures has been a lifelong passion of mine, and so has bringing people together. I embarked on my first trip around the world at the age of 19, and discovered that food was my way into connecting with people.
These passions led me to become a restaurant critic for the Star Tribune, to create a community conversation program called Minnesota’s Talking, to launch an early citizen journalism project called the Twin Cities Daily Planet, to lead tours to Iran, Cuba and Morocco, and to help organize the Twin Cities Iranian Culture Collective.
I created Global Twin Cities to connect globally-minded Minnesotans to each other, and to the rest of the world. I am inviting friends of mine from around the world — including Australia, Brazil, Cuba, France, Iran and Turkey — to be part of this project, and I hope you will do the same.
Global Twin Cities also has a larger purpose. I believe that we can never have a healthy democracy as long as our social media (and economy and politics) are controlled by a handful of oligarchs. Global Twin Cities is intended as an experiment in creating a different kind of social network — one that users can build for themselves, without algorithms, advertisers or spam. I will never sell or share your information, and the site is hosted in France, under European privacy laws. Global Twin Cities is free, non-commercial, and paid for by me.
On Global Twin Cities, you can create your own group — we call them Spaces — and decide who you want to include and exclude, what other groups you want to join and people you want to hear from. You can also start your own blog, create a photo gallery, and post a question for discussion on our Forum page. Anything is fair game, as long as it is somehow related to connecting global and local, and conforms to our community guidelines.
This project will only succeed if it helps people like you to do the things you want to do. Please let me know how we can make it more useful.