World Monitor: The Open-Source Real-Time Global Intelligence Dashboard [2026]

When geopolitical events accelerate — a conflict escalation, a financial shock, a natural disaster intersecting with an energy grid — the gap between what is happening and what reaches traditional news cycles can be hours. Analysts, researchers, journalists, and operations teams that need situational awareness faster than a news cycle have historically relied on expensive proprietary tools.

World Monitor is the open-source answer to that problem.

Built by Elie Habib and 102 contributors at github.com/koala73/worldmonitor, World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard that aggregates 500+ curated news feeds across 15 categories, synthesizes them with AI, renders geopolitical data on a dual 3D/flat map engine, and runs entirely open-source under AGPL-3.0. As of June 2026, it has accumulated 59,200 GitHub stars and 9,300 forks — among the highest for any OSINT or geopolitical intelligence tool on the platform.

What World Monitor Does

The project description is precise: real-time global intelligence dashboard, AI-powered news aggregation, geopolitical monitoring, and infrastructure tracking in a unified situational awareness interface.

Breaking that down:

500+ curated news feeds across 15 categories — the feeds cover geopolitics, finance, energy, climate, aviation, cybersecurity, military activity, infrastructure, and more. They are not scraped from an RSS list; they are curated by the project and maintained with a freshness monitor covering 35 source groups.

AI-synthesized briefs — incoming feeds are synthesized into structured intelligence briefs. The AI synthesis runs via Ollama (local, no API key), Groq, or OpenRouter. Browser-side inference is also available through Transformers.js, meaning the synthesis can run with no server-side AI dependency at all.

Dual map engine — World Monitor ships two independent map implementations: a 3D globe using globe.gl backed by Three.js, and a flat WebGL map using deck.gl backed by MapLibre GL. The two engines are switchable in-app. Between them they support 56 map layer types — military movements, conflict zones, aviation traffic, weather systems, economic indicators, and more.

Country Instability Index (CII) — a server-authoritative composite score covering 31 Tier-1 countries. CII v8 synthesizes political, economic, military, and social signals into a numeric stress score that updates continuously. The scoring algorithm is documented in the project's architecture docs.

Finance radar — 29 stock exchanges, commodities, cryptocurrency, and a 7-signal market composite. The finance variant (finance.worldmonitor.app) deploys this as its primary view.

Local AI with Ollama — the entire dashboard, including AI synthesis, can run offline with no external API keys. This is an explicit design goal, serving air-gapped environments and users with strict privacy requirements.

Native desktop app — a Tauri 2 (Rust) desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with Node.js sidecar for the server-side components. The desktop app switches between site variants in-app from a single binary.

24 languages — native-language feeds with RTL support, covering a genuinely global news surface rather than English-primary feeds translated.

Six Site Variants From One Codebase

One of the more architecturally interesting decisions: six publicly deployed site variants — worldmonitor.app, tech.worldmonitor.app, finance.worldmonitor.app, commodity.worldmonitor.app, happy.worldmonitor.app, energy.worldmonitor.app — all ship from a single codebase with a single release process.

The variant system controls which feeds, map layers, and UI emphasis are active. The finance variant foregrounds exchange data and market composites. The energy variant foregrounds grid infrastructure and commodity price feeds. The happy variant surfaces positive news signals. Each is a different configuration of the same underlying engine, not a separate product.

For teams self-hosting, this means you can deploy a domain-specific variant (a financial intelligence dashboard, an energy sector monitor, a tech news aggregator) from the same codebase and keep updates synchronized across all variants with a single upgrade.

Tech Stack

World Monitor's stack reflects a project that prioritizes rendering performance and offline capability:

The Protocol Buffers layer — 276 protos across 34 services — is notable for a frontend-heavy project. It gives the API contracts strong typing and schema evolution guarantees across a codebase with 102 contributors, and it makes the API surface inspectable without documentation.

The 3-tier caching architecture (Redis → CDN → service worker) is specifically designed to keep the dashboard responsive under high-traffic conditions and to support offline access from the service worker cache.

65+ Data Sources

World Monitor aggregates 65+ external data providers and APIs across:

• Geopolitics and conflict — ACLED conflict data, Tzeva Adom (Israeli alert system), UN data
• Finance — 29 stock exchanges, CoinGecko for crypto, commodity price feeds
• Aviation — ADS-B flight data via Wingbits (credited in the README)
• Climate and energy — energy grid monitoring, weather system data
• Cybersecurity — cyber incident tracking feeds
• News — 500+ curated RSS and structured news feeds across 15 categories

The freshness monitor covering 35 source groups ensures data staleness is surfaced rather than silently served. When a source goes down or delays, the dashboard reflects it.

How to Run It

The barrier to getting World Monitor running locally is intentionally low:

git clone https://github.com/koala73/worldmonitor.git
cd worldmonitor
npm install
npm run dev

Open localhost:3000. No environment variables required for the core dashboard.

Feature-specific API keys unlock additional data — TRAVELPAYOUTS_API_TOKEN for the fly LON DXB flight price command, for example — but the main geopolitical dashboard, maps, AI briefs, and finance radar all run without any configuration.

For variant-specific development:

npm run dev:tech       # tech.worldmonitor.app
npm run dev:finance    # finance.worldmonitor.app
npm run dev:commodity  # commodity.worldmonitor.app
npm run dev:happy      # happy.worldmonitor.app
npm run dev:energy     # energy.worldmonitor.app

For production deployment, the project supports Vercel (60+ edge functions), Docker (full stack and compose files provided), and static hosting. The self-hosting guide at the docs covers all three paths.

The Cross-Stream Correlation Feature

One capability that distinguishes World Monitor from a news aggregator: cross-stream correlation.

The system is designed to detect when signals across military, economic, disaster, and escalation data streams converge — the kind of compound event where a conflict escalation, a commodity supply disruption, and a financial market reaction are all related but arrive through different feeds on different timescales.

Cross-stream correlation surfaces those convergences rather than presenting each stream in isolation. This is the core analytical capability that differentiates a situational awareness tool from a news reader: the ability to show that three things happening in different domains are likely the same underlying event.

AI Brief Architecture

The AI brief system is worth examining separately because the design choices here reflect deliberate tradeoffs.

The project supports three AI paths:

Ollama (local) — model runs on the user's machine. No data leaves the environment. Works offline. Latency depends on local hardware. The entire AI synthesis pipeline, including the country instability scoring and news brief generation, can run on a consumer laptop.

Groq / OpenRouter (cloud) — cloud inference for users who want faster synthesis or want to use specific models. Requires API keys but delivers significantly faster response times for brief generation.

Transformers.js (browser-side) — runs in the browser itself, using WebAssembly. No server required, no API key required, no Ollama install required. Lower quality than the server-side paths but works in any browser with no setup.

The three-path architecture means the AI component degrades gracefully: best quality with a local Ollama model, good quality with cloud inference, basic quality with the browser runtime, and the dashboard still works (without AI briefs) with none of the above configured.

License and Commercial Use

World Monitor is licensed AGPL-3.0. The license allows:

• Personal, research, and educational use
• Self-hosted instances
• Forks with modifications (copyleft applies — source must be shared)
• Commercial use (under AGPL terms — source of modifications must be available)

Private-source proprietary use requires a separate commercial license, which the project makes available. Brand and trademark usage of the "World Monitor" name also requires permission separate from the code license.

For most self-hosting scenarios — a security operations center, a research institution, a newsroom, a financial firm's internal intelligence tool — the AGPL terms are workable. The AGPL obligation (share source of modifications) applies to software deployed as a network service, so any customized internal deployment that is not exposed to external users is not typically subject to the share-source requirement.

Who World Monitor Is Built For

The project's README describes the target as analysts, researchers, journalists, and operations teams — but the 59,200 stars and 9,300 forks tell a broader story. The contributors include people building security operations dashboards, emergency management tools, financial intelligence systems, and personal geopolitical monitors.

A few categories where it is particularly well-suited:

Security and threat intelligence teams — the CII scoring, conflict data from ACLED, and cross-stream correlation are designed for teams tracking geopolitical risk to infrastructure or supply chains.

Financial analysts tracking macro events — the finance variant with 29 exchanges plus commodity feeds plus geopolitical context gives macro analysts a unified view that most Bloomberg terminals do not provide.

Journalists and researchers — the 500+ feeds with 24-language coverage, AI-synthesized briefs, and flight/port activity data give investigative journalists faster signal than traditional monitoring services.

Operations teams with regional exposure — companies with physical operations in geopolitically active regions use tools like this to monitor for events that could affect supply chains, personnel safety, or business continuity.

Developers building intelligence tools — the codebase, with its Protocol Buffers contracts and modular variant system, is a working reference architecture for anyone building a data-aggregation and visualization product.

The 59K Star Trajectory

World Monitor reached 59,200 stars from a project that started as a single developer's personal dashboard. The growth trajectory reflects something about the moment: professional-grade OSINT and geopolitical intelligence tools have historically been expensive and proprietary. World Monitor demonstrated that an open-source version is buildable — and the community responded.

The 102 contributors include engineers from across the industry, and the issue and PR counts (76 open issues, 101 open PRs) reflect an active project with ongoing development rather than a viral-but-abandoned repository.

The Wingbits aviation data partnership, the ACLED conflict data integration, and the AGPL commercial licensing structure all suggest a project with a sustainability model rather than a side project.

World Monitor is at github.com/koala73/worldmonitor. The live dashboard is at worldmonitor.app. Architecture documentation is at docs.worldmonitor.app.