Last week the ShapeBlue team flew in from all corners of the globe to the Lake District, UK, for ShapeBlue Con 2023. The event is our company’s annual get-together which provides an opportunity for developing interpersonal relationships, collaborating on new and existing ideas and ultimately having a good time together.
As a remote team, we believe getting together as a collective in person is essential. As, ultimately it provides the opportunity for many conversations to be had, which would not take place virtually. 
Through all the collaborative activities and conversations taking place during ShapeBlue Con, each team member develops and improves their technical knowledge and skills around CloudStack by sharing knowledge and new ideas with the broader team.
It is fair to say that by the end of the week, the long-term strategy for ShapeBlue is more clearly aligned with each team member, which is vital to support the long-term growth of our employee-owned company.
Sessions
Each day consisted of two blocks of sessions, which were based on a wide variety of topics, such as the progression of ShapeBlue, new ideas around Apache CloudStack, its features and integrations, new opportunities for marketing and brand awareness, as well as ShapeBlue’s employee ownership scheme.
Some of the stand-out sessions from the week are: The Next Decade of CloudStack; Culture, Value and Ownership; The State of the Union and the Employee Ownership Council Meeting. Separate to these, some of the stand-out technical sessions that took place are: the SDN/Tungsten & CloudStack workshop, CI/CD Improvements and The Future of Integrations Tests. 
Being an employee-owned company, ShapeBlue holds the belief that every employee should have a voice in the future of the company, as well as in the way it operates. Therefore, ShapeBlue Con is the perfect opportunity to hear from all team members on any new and exciting ideas.
Activities
ShapeBlue Con also saw an activity each day for anybody willing to participate, ranging from football to rounders, to hiking to cold water swimming! After these activities, in the evenings, the team relaxed and played a number of other games, such as ping pong, pool and even FIFA.
Outside of all of the sessions and activities, many of the evenings saw Steve and Vladi on the guitars!
Next year
The detail for the next ShapeBlueCon is still to be decided. However, the other annual event which sees the whole ShapeBlue team get together is the CloudStack Collaboration Conference. This year the event is taking place in Paris on 23-24th November, which the team are already looking forward to!
Jamie had been involved in marketing for 3 years prior to joining the company. He is heavily involved in the marketing activities for both ShapeBlue and Apache CloudStack. In his free time, Jamie likes training MMA and rugby.
