A few notable tips gathered from experience:

- Don’t assume people will be interested in your project because it is free or open source.
- You’ll probably have contributors who express an interest in joining your project, but with nothing to show. Most of the time these are just time wasters and you should avoid them.
- If you want to promote your project, by far the best way is to post about it on your blog (with lots of screen shots!), and link to it from other blogs, forums, etc.

And a few observations:
- People like stuff which is simple, easy to install, and usable. And of course, reliable.
- PHP solutions tend to be more insanely popular compared to Rails solutions

p.s. rucksack.

Also, let me know if you’re going to work on any other open-source projects… I’ll be keeping an eye out.

Thanks for your interest in RailsCollab. It’s felt like a long running project, and i’ve learned a lot from it. But as you say, it’s really just a clone of a clone, so there is limited room for innovation there - unless i do a complete re-write, which would be a nightmare to say the least. Of course with practically no community, there wouldn’t be much point in doing it anyway.

In any case, i think i’ve pretty much done what i set out to do with RailsCollab. Fork ActiveCollab, learn Rails, and run an Open Source project. To be honest, i feel that i am pretty much finished with developing it. I’m now looking towards other ideas for Open Projects.

In any case, i look forward to seeing how well your new project develops. I hope at least that it fares better than RailsCollab. :)