I'd thrilled to announce the creation of the Related Projects category in the forums!
The forums have been a great way to discuss the development and evolution of the Swift language. Open source, however, plays a much broader role for Swift than just evolving the language and compiler. A growing number of open source projects help support a vibrant software ecosystem written in Swift, and the Swift project itself can help support that ecosystem by expanding the forums to be a potential vehicle for collaboration for those projects as well. Please see the blog post for more details if you are interested in adding a project to Related Projects.
Good question. That's not the intention of the Related Projects category — or at least not directly. The category is meant to support existing Swift open source projects not related to Swift.org, but are using Swift or are part of the general Swift software ecosystem. For example, if there was a math/numerics library out on GitHub (or whatever) it could have a section of the forum for discussion on that particular project.
There are several "exploration topics" the community would like to investigate and discuss. This isn't the place for them, unless they are tied to a particular open source project. I recognize the community's interest in pushing forward on those topics and myself and others are looking at the right way to facilitate both discussion but also the means for those explorations to gradually take shape into real prototypes, etc. One thing about Related Projects is that it provides discussion support for those who want to prototype ideas by building actual open source libraries. Building libraries that are successful and then proposing them for inclusion into Swift proper may be one way to support a diversity of efforts.
Or is it intended that this new category doesn't appear in the swift.org page as the page is more focused on describing how to communicate between swift.org users & contributors only?