Wow, making an account here is painful, and it's impossible to recover my old account. Anyway, that madness out of the way...

Gridcoin is very much alive. Most of the developer activity is now in Slack (you can check for yourself at teamgridcoin.slack.com) and the community action has largely moved to Reddit and Steemit where it's growing rapidly (just hit over 3000 users on reddit and growing by 25-50 a day now).

Regarding development, I'd recommend https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@ravonn/upcoming-gridcoin-3-7-0-0-changes for a good overview of what's coming up.