"Software Freedom Day, a celebration of Free Software and Open Source, announced tha the SFD group for Nicaragua won one of three top places worldwide for their efforts on bringing Open Source Software to the people.

Schools across Nicaragua are the latest part of this nation which is being digitally liberated

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago.

While many today see Linux as a "just download it" or "just buy it" product, it hasn't always been that way. Installfests were actually the norm. Well, that's what is happening in Nicaragua. I received the following announcement in email—not from a geek mailing list but from the list of a social rights activists.

The location and date of the annual Debian developers conference have been announced, the event will be held in Managua, Nicaragua in July 2012. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely.

The SFD Nicaragua 2009 event was a huge success! via Yader Velásquez

"Jalapa is a municipality in the Nueva Segovia Department of Nicaragua, which is located on the border of Honduras.[...]Today, the local government of Jalapa is making a strong bet on the future, migrating their workstations and servers to Free and Open Source Software, specifically Ubuntu Linux."

Let's call that site the Geek Ranch. (When I say "let's" I mean us, not everyone. While its primary focus is to appeal to geeks, we will have to call it something else for general marketing.) As far as a site, it is about 265 acres of land in the mountains of the Tisey Preserve near Estelí, Nicaragua.

While there is a lot more to it than just being for geeks, here is the geek angle. The property will have "geek cabinas" scattered around a pine forest within the property. If you want to escape from the rat race for a while--a month, six months, whatever--you will be able to inexpensively rent a private cabina. It will come with Internet connectivity, maid service and all your meals. In other words, no routine responsibilities.

The UK Government Service Design Manual says to "Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, Web servers, databases and programming languages." The policy is in place to move forward.