[EvanPlaice]

So, what's the solution here? Other than some 'hand wavey' call to action for devs to work together?

I am the author of a handful of OSS libs, one of which is very popular. Of the 500k+ downloads; not including repo clones, package manager installs, etc I can count the number of contributors other than myself on one hand.

Considering the relatively recent migration over from Google Code the number of stars it has is under 100. From the users I've interacted with, I would be shocked to find that even a small fraction of them understand how it works.

From the 4 contributors, except for one useful bugfix (that introduced another bug), their impact has been mostly insignificant.

At one point, one impatient dev requesting a fix forked and atrempted to assume ownership of the project. But that dev disappeared soon after and just left more work for me to clean up after.

So, do tell. Aside from marketing the hell out of it on blogs and referencing it on SO by answering relevant questions, where do I go to find other passionate OSS devs to help support my project.

It's easy to find contributors on projects that require only general knowledge, such as building a website or creating collections of links.

For anything that requires even a little specialized knowledge, it's difficult borderlining on impossible to find help.

I don't need contributors with specialized knowledge. I need contributors who can provide more working examples, better documentation, and can improve the tests.

[innerspirit]

I believe sites like http://up-for-grabs.net/ and https://openhatch.org/ are the kind of communities that we need more of.

There is an attitude where people create projects to feed their egos, and giving help on existing projects doesn't seem to fulfil egos so much. Unfortunately, marketing your project is necessary, and for now the only idea I can give you is that we need to build tools to make that job easier.