Blender 3D as a project starts to pick up the pace in an increasing way. It seems that more developers are finding the project and getting used to the codebase. The Google Summer of Code projects certainly have been great, and will be in the future.
The developers are active on IRC and the mailinglists, and often help out those who need guidance through the code or with the build process.
The metrics for the project are very nice, and show great activity, increasingly so.