With an aim of developing and delivering open source geospatial solutions to the UN, the UN Open GIS Initiative was established in March 2016, taking full advantage of mission partner expertise from UN member states, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGO’s and private sector. In order to fulfil the diverse requirements of UN field operations, the scope of the UN Open GIS Initiative covers the geospatial software of the UN Spatial Data I nfrastructure. The activities are organized into four working groups, referred to as ‘spirals’; Spiral one for geo-portal and system infrastructure, Spiral two for capacity building, Spiral three for geo-analytic functions, and Spiral four for geospatial data collection. This talk will cover an overall introduction of the UN Open GIS initiative including the vision, strategies, technical roadmaps, and achievements of each working group. The experiences and lessons learned from the initiative will be shared during the talk, which we hope will be helpful to the UN as well as developing countries. We will also discuss how to leverage the FOSS4G community and the UN Open GIS Initiative.