Technical and policy needs for expanding to new projects

I see a lot of ideas for valuable knowledge Projects that haven't become part of Wikimedia's efforts for various reasons. It can be difficult to know how to start a new Project; or to know how to propose the incorporation of an existing project into a current Wikimedia project. It can be difficult to know how to address notability issues head-on (if you run a comprehensive educational reference for high schools or published books or landmarks around the world, with your own internal notion of what is notable enough for inclusion: can such a project merge with Wikipedia without having much of its carefully curated summarily deleted? Where is the forum for discussing the policy changes, perhaps across languages, that might be needed to accomodate a merge?)

I see two core questions that need to be resolved to clarify how we can expand into new content areas. One is about tools -- what sorts of projects can we undertake? and the other is about policy -- what policy options do we have when starting new projects or adopting existing ones?

Technical Needs

I'm trying to crystallize the concerns I hear (not my own) from people who are concerned by the growth and progress of smaller Projects, and see that as a potential cost rather than an opportunity. This is the predominant argument against starting new Projects; we do not lack for ideas for Projects within our mission scope.

One of the most predictable costs is one of development of interfaces, data models, &c necessary for new projects.

Two straightforward examples are OSM and Multilingual Wiktionary / OmegaWiki. Are they in line with our mission? Yes. Do they run on MediaWiki? No. Are they Wikimedia projects? No. If they had started life as Wikimedia projects, would we have supported their development as well as their independent grassroots efforts have?

If we are only willing to support current MediaWiki features and simple extensions, that affects how we frame the idea of what new Projects can look like or accomplish. If we can do more, then these are case studies to use in evaluating how we can improve our process.