As I prepare to attend this year's Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco week after next, I find myself curious about the possibilities (I still find the name Wisdom 2.0 extremely evocative and I guess I harbor the secret hope of having my mind blown at the conference and discovering hundreds if not thousands of "lost" members of "my tribe").

One of the pioneers of extraordinary gatherings is Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of the TED conference, and apparently that was just the beginning of his ideas for super-human gatherings. His wwwConference in September 2012 paired particularly interesting duos, placed them on a comfortable couch in front of an exclusive audience (tickets were $16,000 – where's that Press Pass when I need it?) and set them loose with each other.

I have to say I'm impressed by Wurman's courage and his faith in the power of conversation. According to Dan Munro in Forbes, the results were truly inspired. I look forward to hearing these conversations myself and hope they will be made available, as one of the great innovations of TED was making those equally expensive presentations available free to the public.

Wurman's new ideas include Prophesy2025 in Spring of 2013, and the multi-generational Geeks and Geezers Summit in the Spring of 2014, which sounds particularly interesting.