The Era of Unearned Confidence

I was just listening to comedian Will Ferrell on Fresh Air. He talked about how many of the characters he and his writing partner have created are based on the idea of "unearned confidence." Anyone who has seen Anchor Man or Talladega Nights would know instantly what he means. It's one of those concepts that makes perfect sense once it's pointed out to you.

I started thinking that perhaps we're leaving in the era of unearned confidence. There are many other characters who exhibit this, for instance both bosses in the Office (the US and England versions). One could also make the case that our current president exhibits this better than any other character, fictional or real. Perhaps this is why these characters are so funny to us.

Work: LSB Developer Network

I currently run marketing for the Free Standards Group, the certification and standardization authority for Linux. Since the goal of the organization is to make Linux a more attractive platform for developers, we realized we desperately needed to offer more and better developer support and services.

As a non-profit with a big agenda, we have limited resources at the FSG. So we've created a beta version of the LSB Developer Network to address this need. We've taken a community-based, bottom-up approach to developer support. We'd like this to become the open source equivalent to the Microsoft Developer Network but we have a long way to go. We've also desperately realized we need greater expertise, especially UI and information architecture help. So far this project has been a collaboration by and large between Ian Murdock (the founder of Debian and currently our CTO) and me.

It's been a fun project as I've been able to think about some of the web technologies I'm personally interested. We've integrated with del.icio.us in creating a link directory. I'd like to implement a voting system for user contributed content, but again, that takes resources. There is far more we need to do, but it's a start.