With your local website example, did the people know how to contribute to it? Would they be able to do the full flow of writing -> gathering feedback -> publishing the article without you? Did they know what articles you wanted written? Same goes for the random "awesome lists" people are building. If it's not clear what's missing and what should be added, people really don't know where to get started, so the contributions will be very small.

I'm currently working on a project where we want to get designers to contribute to open source design. I expected it to be very hard to find any designer who would understand and wanted to contribute, as that's what I found before on other open source projects I've done.

But this time I focused on making it really easy for them to contribute, and lo and behold, just one week after soft-launching, we already have 2-3 designers onboard who contribute their time to help out with our open source design.