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.  Their event was held on September 13th in Managua, with the participation of organizers: Grupo Ubuntu Nicaragua [es], Suse-NUI Nicaragua [es], Grupo Fedora-ni [es], and Debian GNU/Linux Nicaragua [es].This is the email announcing one of the organizers the good news:

We are very pleased to tell you that the SFD NIcaragua 2007 Team competition entry for Best Event has been chosen as one of three winners! Congratulations!We were very impressed with your event. You had excellent community participation and non-geek inclusion, activities, media coverage (we loved the interviews!), collateral, technology demonstrations and of course information about Software Freedom and FOSS. Your teams hard work and dedication is inspiring and the excellent media coverage you achieved is tribute to those efforts.Well done! You do your country and the FOSS community proud, and are a true example of what Software Freedom Day is all about!Please pass on our congratulations and praise to your team, and your community.Cheers,Pia  

Check the SDF group page  which details all the efforts being made to help people jump into open source software.  The page includes conference preparation and most importantly, conclusions post-conference:

7. Conclusions

• The SFD Nicaragua 2007 event was a huge success in terms of the attention gained from the local media and the non-geek public. More than two weeks after the event people continued to call and e-mail the local GNU/Linux groups seeking for information about free software.
• The LTSP and Edulinux projects got some attention from a couple of local schools. As of today, we are having talks with the representatives from these institutions in order to figure out how we best can help them with this initiative.
• At the international level, the Central American communities were brought closer together and work has already begun on some interesting joint projects(see 4.1.4).
• Last, but not least, the involvement of the younger members of the community in the SFD event (see 4.1.4) is seen as a huge step forward for the future of the FOSS movement in our country. Future plans, in particular within the Ubuntu community, includes the establishment of a local computer club for kids and young people.