This is a good use case for forum federation. These two spaces could have been unified, reducing the overhead of maintaining both, while still making it easier for people to find and comment on the topics raised using accounts on Lemmy services (or similar) instead of SH accounts.
As @how says;
The obvious workflow to me is that new projects can be invited to use a category here, so they can have forum space without the overhead of setting up their own forum instance (or even the decision-making overhead of coming to consensus on what software/ service to use for it). If they don’t survive to maturity, at least there is some record of their existence others can learn from.
If they do survive and mature, they may want to establish their own forum. We can then encourage them to have a category specifically for interop discussions, and federate that with their category here. Which is what we ought to be doing with existing AP projects that currently operate their own forum.