World monitor: a map based intelligence dashboard

You know that feeling when a crisis breaks and you're toggling between Twitter, a flight tracker, a fire map, a financial terminal, and three news sites just to piece together what's happening? There's no single view that correlates military movements with market reactions and infrastructure disruptions in real time. You end up with 20 browser tabs and no way to see how events connect across domains.

Think of it as a smart RSS aggregator on steroids that geolocates every event on a map. Seed scripts running on Railway pull data from 65+ external APIs (conflict databases, satellite fire detection, flight trackers, crypto exchanges), publish updates to Redis, and a 4-layer cache hierarchy serves them to your browser. The map uses deck.gl + MapLibre GL for flat view or globe.gl for 3D, with 45 toggleable data layers. When you want a summary, a 4-tier AI fallback chain tries local Ollama first, then Groq, then OpenRouter, then falls back to running a T5 model directly in your browser via Transformers.js. The whole thing is a custom RPC framework called Sebuf — 92 protobuf definitions generating typed client/server stubs instead of using gRPC-Web.

• 65+ data source aggregation — why you care: one interface replaces GDELT, ACLED, FIRMS, Finnhub, CoinGecko, OpenSky, AISStream, and dozens more; cross-domain correlation (military + economic + disaster) happens automati...
• 4-tier AI summarization fallback — why you care: starts with local Ollama (free, private), falls back to Groq, then OpenRouter, then browser-side Transformers.js; you get summaries without mandatory cloud API keys.
• Dual map engine (deck.gl + globe.gl) — why you care: switch between a 2D WebGL flat map and a 3D globe with 45 data layers; different visualization modes for different analysis needs.
• 5 site variants from one codebase — why you care: world, tech, finance, commodity, and happy variants each focus on a domain without separate repos or deployments.
• Native desktop app (Tauri 2) — why you care: runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux as a native app with platform keyring for secrets, not just a browser tab.
• 4-layer cache with stampede protection — why you care: seed → in-memory → Redis → upstream fetch hierarchy means repeated views are fast and API rate limits don't get exhausted.
• Custom Sebuf RPC framework — why you care: 92 protobuf definitions across 22 services generate typed stubs; you get gRPC-like type safety with a lighter HTTP-first transport.

Who It Is For

If you're a developer or analyst who needs situational awareness across geopolitics, finance, and infrastructure — and you're comfortable wiring up API keys and running Docker containers. Not for you if you want a lightweight news reader (the Watchtower Go TUI was built explicitly because World Monitor overwhelms non-intelligence professionals), or if you need an MIT-licensed component you can em...

Worth Exploring?

Worth cloning and running `npm run dev` to see the map interface — it's genuinely impressive at correlating data sources most people check separately. The 48K stars, 74 contributors, and 43 releases signal a healthy project with real momentum. But know the trade-offs before committing: full production deployment requires Vercel + Railway + Upstash + Convex + Cloudflare R2, the vanilla TypeScript approach (no React/Vue) means 86+ manual panel classes, and the AGPL-3.0 license limits commercial use unless you pay. Best explored as a local tool first.