Reading Peterme's post about being without a tribe struck a nerve with me. I have been feeling like I am ungrounded lately. Several years ago it was super clear. Being very involved in getting Boxes and Arrows off the ground, then kickstarting the IA Institute (known as AIFIA at the time), continued editing and writing for B&A and working hard to contribute to the community, it was clear where I belonged and where my place was in the bigger picture of our community. The last couple of years though I have felt that the organizations — AIGA, BayChi, IA Institute and others — aren't quite meeting my needs as far as networking and career development is concerned.

Like Peter mentions, the place I feel most at home is with the folks at the IA Summit. This may be because it feels like coming home. I know so many of these folks and have gone through the cycles of jobs, layoffs, starting over and growing up with many of these people.

But all that said, I still don't think this is quite right either. Lately I have been wondering if some of this is because I am a manager in a large corporate environment. While design, interactions and IA work are important to me, I am not practicing actively anymore. The details of HOW to do the job are not that important to me personally.

Business conversations and conferences seem more geared to the entrepeneur and the consultant. The issues I face — The concerns I have are more centered around growing a team, managing creatives within a rapid development environment, differentiating design across a matrixed organization and still trying to make an impact on our community in and out of the workspace — the network and mentoring I need doesn't seem to be readily apparent.

Seeing a trend from a few years ago - being in the thick of creating a new thing for us - I wonder...

Perhaps it is time to CREATE something new to meet this need?

Are there others out there like me looking for support from a like community?

I have been thinking about Identity a lot lately. One of the things my team thinks about in relation to the Yahoo! Network is identity and how a person is represented across the websites. It got me thinking back to an essay I started to write back in 2001 about the same topic and I wondered if we know any more today than we did back then.

I have been so slack. I thought when I revived this site that I would have things to say but I am sooo busy at work it is hard to sustain the interest after hours.

I am however hiring - looking for 2 visual designers for platform design and 2 interaction designers for community platforms. Ping me if you are interested - emalone at yahoo-inc.com.

We also just launched the second batch of patterns for the Yahoo! Public Pattern library. This batch includes patterns for Transitions, Invitations and our Grid Kit including the CSS to create 122 different layouts using one CSS file. Our web developers rock!