Engagement is something that's required for contribution. For example, I would never contribute to your project because I don't even know it exists :-) Even i

Engagement is something that's required for contribution. For example, I would never contribute to your project because I don't even know it exists :-) Even if I did, I've got little reason to do anything other than use the result. Occasionally people stumble across projects. I had a very long running project to help myself learn Japanese. I had about 1000 users at one point that stumbled across my project randomly on the site where I hosted it. But I never had any more than that because I never put any effort into engagement (although, I think my documentation was actually pretty impressive, for a programmer ;-) ). I think just having a project is not really enough. You need to create a reason for others to reach out to you. A conversation is a bit like a game of catch. In order for someone to catch the ball, you have to throw it first. I've been streaming development of the game I'm working on and I've been really surprised by the response. I've got more contributions in the short time I've been doing that than I've ever gotten on my other projects. I think the key is that having already started the conversation in the chat of the stream, it's easy for people to get invested and to contribute. I think there are other ways to start that conversation, but I think it's fairly tricky. Possibly having a blog would be another way. Once you get 1 or 2 people responding with comments, you can engage them and then others will join in. In the old days, that's what happened with mailing lists.