It's been about half a year since I posted anything here, and I've realized that people still make their way here occasionally.  So, a brief explanation of what's going on.
The NEXT DAY after I tried to start orgazing the conference, I received notice that I probably would not be getting into grad school.  So, that took a lot of energy up, and in the end I did not get into grad school.  Which, as you might imagine, derailed me somewhat.
So, in the meantime, I've been finding my own way to develop a foundation for doing the things I want to do, including being able to pay for them.  Sad but true.  But things are pretty well on track for me, and I'm ramping up for another round of applications.  Even if that doesn't work out, things are sufficiently stable that I'll try to return to work on the whole conference thing.  Stay tuned!  Or even better, point your RSS aggregator at: http://ecult.org/powwow/self_improvement/rss.  (I know, you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

The following is intended to be my first contribution to what I hope will be a fun and useful brainstorming session.  These ideas should not be considered as anything more than a starting point - a set of ideas for you to agree or disagree with, add to or take away from.  Indeed, I am not even proud of what I've written here - but I felt it more important to get something out soon than to get something carefully developed later.

As for process - I do not anticipate a large enough volume to mandate setting up a bulletin board with the requesite user accounts and overhead.  For now, please just e-mail me any contributions you'd like to make to the discussion and I will post them here!  My e-mail address is dav at alum dot mit dot edu.
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At this point, I have encoutered a number of people who seem to hold some mutual interest with me.  There is a problem in that we all seem to have a lot of trouble giving a name to this mutual interest.  Following is an incomplete list of names that are not quite right, but which point in the right direction:

I'd like to trace the contours for what I see as the two main goals for our group for now (I'm leaving the definition of group membership purposefully vague).  I first suggest organizing a conference or track in a larger conference as an immediate concrete objective.  This is directed towards a more long-term goal of developing a community with a certain view towards understanding human improvement.  Specifically, that view would seek to incorporate what we know from behavioral and biological studies of humans and other animals, as well as practical knowlege gained from working with students, patients and others.

More soon...