This is a contribution to the OpenSym 2018 Doctoral Symposium. This paper describes my PhD objectives. As an insider in the Coq development team, I've worked at making the release process of the Coq proof assistant smoother and more automated, at opening the development to external contributions, and at shaping the ecosystem around Coq. I'm intending to evaluate how well-known software engineering techniques and results about open source software communities apply in the specific case of the proof assistant I'm studying.