Clearly there is potential benefit and potential cost to this proposal. The benefit would be that we're exposed to more questions and have larger participation. The cost is that the site might fill with all sorts of questions that don't interest us and we would get lost in the flood.

A good way to judge these factors is to imagine how often the typical user of this site would read / answer questions on memory management, context switching, or image acquisition. We could also try to imagine whether a systems researcher would be interested in strange complexity classes.

My feeling is that the cost would outweigh the benefit. However, it wouldn't have to be that way if the stackexchange software were more flexible!

If you think about a CS department, while all areas of CS are covered, there are separate research groups, labs, etc. We don't all go to each others' talks because, frankly, not all talks are interesting to everyone. So if we structured this more like the CS department in the analogy, I would be all for it.

I think it would be great to have a CS stackexchange site that had multiple "forums" like cstheory. The membership could be shared. The reputation points could transfer across the forums. But each site should have its own homepage which featured only its own questions - tags and filters are not nearly enough. Perhaps the featured bounty questions could be shared across forums, as could questions with very high scores. That way, we could see what exciting things are happening in the other fields and would be tempted to occasionally browse the other forums without their questions clogging the theory ones. This would increase the user base as users from all the forums would occasionally do some browsing and answering each others' questions.

However, I see no way of implementing this idea in the current software. Stackexchange clearly sees the value of combining the various fields because their membership and viewership would grow. So they would have to make it happen by making their software be flexible enough.

Also, of course, the community would have to think it's a good idea :)

Clearly there is potential benefit and potential cost to Joel's proposal. The benefit would be that we're exposed to more questions and have larger participation. The cost is that the site might fill with all sorts of questions that don't interest us and we would get lost in the flood.

A good way to judge these factors is to imagine how often the typical user of this site would read / answer questions on memory management, context switching, or image acquisition. We could also try to imagine whether a systems researcher would be interested in strange complexity classes.

My feeling is that the cost would outweigh the benefit. However, it wouldn't have to be that way if the stackexchange software were more flexible!

If you think about a CS department, while all areas of CS are covered, there are separate research groups, labs, etc. We don't all go to each others' talks because, frankly, not all talks are interesting to everyone. So if we structured this more like the CS department in the analogy, I would be all for it.

Here is an idea:

I think it would be great to have a CS stackexchange site that had multiple "forums" like cstheory. The membership could be shared. The reputation points could transfer across the forums. But each site should have its own homepage which featured only its own questions - tags and filters are not nearly enough. Perhaps the featured bounty questions could be shared across forums, as could questions with very high scores. That way, we could see what exciting things are happening in the other fields and would be tempted to occasionally browse the other forums without their questions clogging the theory ones. This would increase the user base as users from all the forums would occasionally do some browsing and answering each others' questions.

However, I see no way of implementing this idea in the current software. Stackexchange clearly sees the value of combining the various fields because their membership and viewership would grow. So they would have to make it happen by making their software be flexible enough.

Also, of course, the community would have to think it's a good idea :)

I wrote this first as a comment, but I am expanding it into an answer and a proposal:

Clearly there is potential benefit and potential cost to this proposal. The benefit would be that we're exposed to more questions and have larger participation. The cost is that the site might fill with all sorts of questions that don't interest us and we would get lost in the flood.

A good way to judge these factors is to imagine how often the typical user of this site would read / answer questions on memory management, context switching, or image acquisition. We could also try to imagine whether a systems researcher would be interested in strange complexity classes.

My feeling is that the cost would outweigh the benefit. However, it wouldn't have to be that way if the stackexchange software were more flexible!

If you think about a CS department, while all areas of CS are covered, there are separate research groups, labs, etc. We don't all go to each others' talks because, frankly, not all talks are interesting to everyone. So if we structured this more like the CS department in the analogy, I would be all for it.

I think it would be great to have a CS stackexchange site that had multiple "forums" like cstheory. The membership could be shared. The reputation points could transfer across the forums. But each site should have its own homepage which featured only its own questions - tags and filters are not nearly enough. Perhaps the featured bounty questions could be shared across forums, as could questions with very high scores. That way, we could see what exciting things are happening in the other fields and would be tempted to occasionally browse the other forums without their questions clogging the theory ones. This would increase the user base as users from all the forums would occasionally do some browsing and answering each others' questions.

However, I see no way of implementing this idea in the current software. Stackexchange clearly sees the value of combining the various fields because their membership and viewership would grow. So they would have to make it happen by making their software be flexible enough.

Also, of course, the community would have to think it's a good idea :)

Clearly there is potential benefit and potential cost to this proposal. The benefit would be that we're exposed to more questions and have larger participation. The cost is that the site might fill with all sorts of questions that don't interest us and we would get lost in the flood.

A good way to judge these factors is to imagine how often the typical user of this site would read / answer questions on memory management, context switching, or image acquisition. We could also try to imagine whether a systems researcher would be interested in strange complexity classes.

My feeling is that the cost would outweigh the benefit. However, it wouldn't have to be that way if the stackexchange software were more flexible!

If you think about a CS department, while all areas of CS are covered, there are separate research groups, labs, etc. We don't all go to each others' talks because, frankly, not all talks are interesting to everyone. So if we structured this more like the CS department in the analogy, I would be all for it.

I think it would be great to have a CS stackexchange site that had multiple "forums" like cstheory. The membership could be shared. The reputation points could transfer across the forums. But each site should have its own homepage which featured only its own questions - tags and filters are not nearly enough. Perhaps the featured bounty questions could be shared across forums, as could questions with very high scores. That way, we could see what exciting things are happening in the other fields and would be tempted to occasionally browse the other forums without their questions clogging the theory ones. This would increase the user base as users from all the forums would occasionally do some browsing and answering each others' questions.

However, I see no way of implementing this idea in the current software. Stackexchange clearly sees the value of combining the various fields because their membership and viewership would grow. So they would have to make it happen by making their software be flexible enough.

Also, of course, the community would have to think it's a good idea :)