People tend to have different incentives for contributing. A ton of it is people scratching their own itch. You still need a core team to drive a project. If y

People tend to have different incentives for contributing. A ton of it is people scratching their own itch. You still need a core team to drive a project. If you want contributors you'll need users. People have a finite amount of time in a given day. They aren't going to contribute because you want them to. They want to get something out of it. It could be learning something, fixing a bug that affects their day job, an interesting side project for a weekend (some folks pick random projects to contribute to) Open sourcing something also has different incentives. Many successful projects are either run by foundations or companies with the hopes of attracting talent. Try to understand what the incentive structure is for people and contributors follow from that. You still need to do project promotion as well. That's a whole separate topic though.