Comment by mattbierner

I maintain a few open source projects that many developers use (along with many more projects that no one uses) and I get like one PR a month. It seems like some developer’s entire workflows depend on some of the tools and libs I maintain, but I don’t even use the damn things myself.

That seems like the perfect case for self interest: make this thing you use all the time work better for you. The code is usually fairly clean and the contribution process documented. And yet all the help wanted issues just sit there.

How have other maintainers been able to encourage more valuable community contributions?