We need an intro explaining what are Featured Projects and what is their role onboarding new developers.
We also need the list itself. phab:T165920 lists some projects already, and we could start from there (I'd need to check with Kiwix again, so they are aware). I wonder about the format of the list. The project title alone will not be very informative or attractive for newcomers.
I added a "Background" section in Featured Projects. We run into the problem of page audience - that page currently targets project maintainers; a page listing the participating projects should be separate and focus new contributors, as part of a "several steps" approach which would require reworking our horrible onboarding docs quite a bit. So it should be moved, but for moving we need to have a grip about the structure of pages for new contributors (I like https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers a lot; cf. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164084).
Format of the project list: I like the format on How to contribute. Or the boxes on Manual:Pywikibot. (Basically: Anything that does not look like a dusty wall of text but more like a recent page.)
(Unrelated recent thought: "Featured Projects" might sound like the point of view of some organization. As a potential contributor I might rather want to find "Recommended Projects" or such. But I might be bikeshedding.)