To continue from yesterday...

...while our focus going in was to be learning something about the community, I feel like we did learn some things about event organization over the past few weeks. Some "donts," if you will, courtesy of the Project 2011 people.
1. In the weeks leading up to the event, the Project 2011 organizers sent a series of e-mail imploring volunteers to carpool and take the offered buses only as a last resort due to a limited number of seats. Then, suddenly, the night before the event, the organizers changed their tune and sent out an e-mail saying they had 100 or 200 seats on buses and they weren't sure if there would be sufficient parking for people at the various worksites. Thus, after weeks of DON'T TAKE THE BUS! the message switched to TAKE THE BUS! which I found rather annoying.
2. Signage at Lanier High School was confusing. They had volunteers with large, neon arrows all over the place on the school grounds, and a few poorly conceived signs off of Lamar (northbound only). It was confusing because they had people stationed at various places at the school just to tell you that those were not the right places to go. So after pulling over because you saw volunteers, they'd tell you to keep going, but you wouldn't have pulled over if you hadn't seen volunteers.
3. Some e-mails in the early days after signing up indicated that registration/bus pick-up would be at UT, without specifying the location further. I thought that was pretty funny.
4. Given the general lack of community engagement, I wonder if the Americorps people or whoever made any attempt to engage the local community. I'd really like to ask them, but I don't know how to do so without being passive-aggressive.