For The Linux Foundation, April is not the cruelest month: it’s one of the busiest. Every year, we hold our Collaboration Summit in mid-April to bring together our members, Linux and open source community developers, open source legal minds, and large scale Linux and open source users in an intimate setting. Even as The Linux Foundation has expanded its event lineup to include LinuxCon, CloudOpen, Automotive Linux Summits, and more throughout the world, this remains our original event, and because of that, as well as it’s small size and unique format, it’s special to many of us in the community.

As we prepare I wanted to share some of my top picks for speakers and sessions, as well as remind everyone who can’t join us this year that you can watch the day 1 keynotes for free via live video stream. Just sign up on the Events website.

My picks include:

* Automotive crowd sourcing, presented by Jaguar Land Rover’s Matt Jones. Not only will Matt be speaking about how we can open up the software design process for in-vehicle infotainment, but there will also be a Jaguar Land Rover on display at the event that includes a Linux-based infotainment system.

* Adapteva CEO Andreas Olofsson will talk about how Kickstarter helped them create the $99 supercomputer, the Parallela Project, and how that works is transitioning parallel computing through open hardware. You can get more of a sense for Andreas and his perspectives in this recap of his recent LiveLinuxQA on Twitter.

* Collaborative Projects panel. This panel will include community leadership from a variety of the Collaborative Projects we host here at The Linux Foundation. Projects represented on the panel include Yocto Project, OpenMAMA and a special guest to be announced onsite.

* Netflix’ Adrian Cockcroft, director of architecture and cloud systems, will share how the company is using Linux and managing cloud services for one of the most highly-consumed services today. He will also detail Netflix’ cloud platform. Should be interesting.

* Jon Corbet will present the latest Linux Weather Forecast. This is a “don’t miss.” Jon’s presentations are always entertaining and thorough. If you want to know what’s taking shaping in the Linux kernel, this is the keynote to attend.

I’d also encourage people to drop into a variety of the sessions on days 2 and 3. I’m especially looking forward to GNOME’s Karen Sandler on bringing more women to free and open source software; Creative Commons’ Mike Linkvayer on “Software Eats the World;” and Red Hat’s session on persistent memory for Linux for new storage technologies and interfaces.

You can view the complete Collaboration Summit schedule to see what else you might want to check out next week online or onsite.

Lastly, we’ll be hosting a Xen Project birthday party Monday night at the Julia Morgan Ballroom from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. Please join us to help celebrate a decade of development for this important project.