Me and davedx have discussed this before and we came to this conclusion: it's a healthy thing to have multiple sites in the same space. In reality, a few people

Me and davedx have discussed this before and we came to this conclusion: it's a healthy thing to have multiple sites in the same space. In reality, a few people control the direction of each site. There can only be a single direction for each site. If we were to merge, it would greatly reduce our ability to experiment with new ideas, and ultimately we think it would reduce the number of problems being solved. We don't mind if it's us or them who leads to problems getting solved, we just want to help as many people as possible. What we're very interested in is having a reciprocal agreement with other similar sites, so that we link to them and encourage our solvers to join all the communities. This way, whichever has the best ideas will help the most people. We already have an agreement with interdisciplinaryprogramming.com which hasn't launched yet, and we're in touch with openhatch.org. We'll talk to catchafire too, and we'd love to hear about anything else in this space.