Not that many years have passed since I was most involved in community organizing.

I first was asked to become an officer in the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association in 1994. My busiest stretch was from 1997-2000 when we were working on a lot of stuff in the neighborhood while also helping to organize the Garden District Commission, which led to redevelopment of a large part of the McRee Town neighborhood.

That wasn’t very long ago. The digital era already was well underway.

Still, you had to canvass or leaflet door to door to ensure a lot of people knew something important was coming up — i.e. an important decision was going to being made and interested parties needed to act if they wanted to be heard.

That’s still true, if you want to reach everyone.

But when I first familiarized myself with the social networking phenomenon Facebook, I thought to myself, “Wow, how efficiently could I have gotten the word out with something like this.”

A reader of this blog saw that I was a member of Facebook and invited me to join a group called “Activists in St. Louis for summer ‘08″, which I did.

The group has a nice gathering of members and bills itself as a group “intended to help people staying in St. Louis over the summer stay abreast of local events and find out about opportunities to get involved. The relevant kinds of events can focus on (but are not limited to) peace, the environment, social justice, healthcare, political campaigns, urban renewal, gardening, eco-sabotage, and quilting. It also will be a venue to promote socially conscious cultural events such as poetry, performance art etc.”

But members don’t take themselves too seriously as evidenced by this proposal to form a “caucus of militant grammarians,” (which is not to say good grammar isn’t a serious subect).

An excerpt from the proposed causus’ credo:

Written language is complex, inscrutable, and only properly scribed in long-hand. The robots will not take that from us. Do you seek a forum to argue about serial commas? Do you wonder whether the Germans’ Rechtschreibung could be effected in the Anglophone world? Do you seek other people who even know the word “Anglophone?” If you routinely find yourself at odds with the Microsoft Spellchecker, then this is your place. Language is not the dominion of software engineers, nor of marketroids. We know better, and we know how to wield the Queen’s English in a way that would make your high school teacher blush. Language is power, and it is high time to reclaim the language which we were taught.

I’d be interested to learn how well and in what ways this and similar sites have served as a staging grounds for local community activism.

(Pictured: August 1942 rally at Kiel Auditorium attracted 9,000 people demanding the end of discrimination in the armed forces and in the war industry. Of 45,000 workers employed locally at four plants, only 1,000 were black. St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)