Key Takeaways
The cost of entry for global monitoring has hit near-zero. Open-source platforms like World Monitor, Glint, and Monitor the Situation deliver conflict tracking, flight monitoring, and infrastructure intelligence that previously required six-figure enterprise software contracts.
AI has automated the analyst, not just the data. Large language models now handle news sorting and threat detection locally, on a laptop, allowing smaller teams and NGOs to maintain 24/7 situational awareness without a dedicated intelligence department.
Speed demands new escalation protocols. These tools surface signals — protests, internet outages, infrastructure disruptions — long before mainstream media picks them up. Your crisis team needs predefined triggers before the crisis begins.
Verification is the new professional moat. As situational awareness becomes democratised, the value of a communication team shifts from finding the news to confirming the truth through geolocation and cross-platform corroboration.
Governance separates intelligence from wallpaper. A real-time feed without a playbook is noise. You must define who monitors, who decides, and how data reaches leadership — before anything goes wrong.
What Is Happening to OSINT Right Now?
Something significant is shifting in the open-source intelligence world, and if you work in crisis or risk communication, you need to pay attention.
Over the past several months, a wave of free, open-source situational awareness dashboards has emerged online. Platforms like World Monitor, Glint, and Monitor the Situation now offer capabilities that, until very recently, cost tens of thousands of dollars in enterprise software. You can access real-time global monitoring — interactive maps, news aggregation, geopolitical intelligence — for exactly zero dollars.
These aren't toys. World Monitor tracks over 35 toggleable data layers, following everything from active conflict zones and military flight paths to undersea cables and internet outages, with AI generating intelligence briefs from the raw data. Glint combines a live news feed with a global tension index powered by prediction markets. Monitor the Situation offers a clean, accessible interface for tracking global developments without a dedicated analyst on staff.
These platforms are built by developers and hobbyists, often as open-source projects on GitHub. World Monitor alone has accumulated over 11,000 stars on the platform. People are cloning them, customising them, building their own versions. The movement has momentum.
Why Is This Happening Now?
Three converging forces explain this moment. And understanding them matters if you want to anticipate where this goes next.
First, the raw data is public. Conflict event databases like ACLED, flight tracking via ADS-B exchange, vessel monitoring through AIS, and satellite fire detection from NASA are all freely available. The ingredients for real-time situational awareness have never been more accessible to an average professional with a laptop and an internet connection.
Second, AI has collapsed the barrier to analysis. These platforms use large language models to sort news feeds, detect emerging threats, and generate intelligence briefs. What once required a team of trained analysts can now be partially handled by a model running on consumer hardware. World Monitor even supports local AI processing through Ollama, meaning no sensitive data ever leaves your machine — a critical point for organisations with privacy obligations.
Third, the pace of crisis has outrun traditional monitoring. As Philippe Borremans, founder of RiskComms, wrote in his 2025 research on in-house OSINT capabilities: "We are living through overlapping political unrest, climate emergencies, and cyber incidents. Traditional risk reports are too slow. The weekly media monitoring digest that lands in your inbox on Monday morning is already ancient history by the time you read it." (Borremans, P., 2025, Wag the Dog Newsletter, https://www.wagthedog.io/p/is-it-time-for-in-house-osint-capabilities)
Enterprise OSINT tools remain expensive — platforms like Flashpoint or Dataminr can run into six figures annually. For NGOs, smaller companies, and under-resourced public sector teams, that simply isn't viable. These free alternatives fill a real and growing gap.
What Does This Mean for Crisis and Risk Professionals?
How should communication teams use free OSINT tools for preparedness?
The answer is direct: start now, but start structured. These dashboards make it practical to monitor the regions where your organisation operates, overlaying supply chain geography with conflict data and infrastructure status. That used to require a dedicated analyst. Now it requires a browser tab and a clear brief.
Use these tools to stress-test your crisis plans. Update your risk registers with real-world, real-time data rather than assumptions made during last year's annual review. The gap between theoretical risk and observable risk has never been easier — or cheaper — to close.
How do you turn signals into early warning without acting prematurely?
Speed is the central value proposition of these platforms. They pull signals from dozens of sources simultaneously and surface anomalies fast. For communication teams, this means earlier awareness of developing situations: protests building near a facility, an internet outage in a key operating region, a sudden spike in the tension index for a country where your executives are travelling.
The key discipline is defining your own escalation criteria before you need them. What signal strength triggers an internal alert? What combination of indicators warrants activating your crisis team? These thresholds must be documented, agreed, and tested. Without that, speed becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Why can't OSINT tools replace professional judgement?
Because they surface signals. They don't confirm facts. An AI-generated threat classification is not verified intelligence — it is a hypothesis that requires investigation.
Nico Dekens, Senior VP of Engineering and Chief Innovator at ShadowDragon, makes this point clearly in his 2026 OSINT guide: the value of open-source intelligence lies in transforming publicly available data into actionable insight, but that transformation requires analysts to rigorously verify the authenticity and reliability of information before drawing any conclusions. The tool finds the signal. The human determines what it means. (Dekens, N., 2026, ShadowDragon, https://shadowdragon.io/blog/what-is-osint/)
"A red dot on a map is not intelligence. It is a signal that needs to be investigated."
Use these dashboards to sharpen your questions, not to answer them. Combine what you observe with verification workflows — geolocation, cross-platform corroboration, source triangulation — before any signal drives a response.
What Are the Real Limitations of These Platforms?
Do free OSINT dashboards have blind spots?
Yes. Significant ones. Even sophisticated platforms miss events in data-dark areas or over-represent populations that are highly active online. If your risk landscape includes regions with limited internet infrastructure — parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, or rural conflict zones — these tools will have substantial gaps. You may be watching a very sophisticated map of well-connected places while missing what matters most.
Relying solely on open-source dashboards for global risk coverage is like using a high-resolution photograph of a city centre to understand an entire country. Detailed in parts. Blind in others.
What governance structures are required before deploying OSINT tools?
The RocFortis Group, which advises organisations on geopolitical early warning, identifies governance as a central challenge in any OSINT implementation. Their analysis notes that even when real-time data is available, organisations face critical internal hurdles: filtering relevant signals from the noise, verifying information against misinformation, and ensuring internal teams have the training and capacity to act on what they find. Access to data, in other words, is only the starting point. (PHIL_HOFFELNER, 2025, RocFortis Group, https://rocfortis.com/en/geopolitical-early-risk-detection-how-osint-protects-companies-in-real-time/)
Borremans frames it as three questions every organisation must answer before deploying any dashboard:
Who sees this data? Who decides what it means? What happens next? If you can't answer all three, the feed is just expensive wallpaper — even if it was free.
You must also ensure your use of these tools aligns with your organisation's ethical framework and applicable privacy regulations. Open-source does not mean consequence-free.
The Bigger Picture: What Does the Democratisation of Situational Awareness Actually Mean?
What we are witnessing is a pattern that has played out in field after field — where open-source alternatives erode the monopoly of expensive proprietary tools. It happened in software development, in data analytics, in design, in publishing. Now it is happening in intelligence.
For crisis and risk professionals, this is a pivotal moment.
"The question is no longer whether your organisation can afford to build situational awareness capabilities, it is whether you can afford not to."
The smart move is to start experimenting now. Open World Monitor or Glint in a browser tab. Build views relevant to your organisation's specific risk geography. Learn — genuinely — what these tools can and cannot do. Then have a serious conversation with your leadership about what a governed, hybrid approach to OSINT-powered situational awareness could look like for your team.
The homemade crisis room has arrived. As Borremans puts it: "The only question is whether you'll walk in — or wait to be caught flat-footed by the organisation that already did."
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OSINT and why does it matter for crisis communication? OSINT — Open-Source Intelligence — refers to intelligence gathered from publicly available sources, including news feeds, social media, satellite imagery, flight tracking data, and conflict event databases. For crisis professionals, it provides early warning of developing situations before they reach mainstream media, enabling faster and better-informed response decisions.
Are free OSINT platforms like World Monitor reliable enough for professional use? They are reliable enough to surface signals worth investigating — not reliable enough to act on without verification. World Monitor, Glint, and Monitor the Situation aggregate credible public data sources, but they cannot confirm facts. They are early warning systems, not decision-making systems. Professional judgement and verification workflows remain essential.
What is the biggest risk of using free OSINT tools without proper governance? Acting on unverified signals. Speed is the primary value of these platforms, and that same speed creates pressure to respond before information is confirmed. Without predefined escalation criteria, verification protocols, and clear decision ownership, OSINT dashboards can generate noise rather than intelligence.
How much technical expertise does a communication team need to use these platforms? Very little. World Monitor, Glint, and Monitor the Situation are designed for accessibility. Setting up a relevant view of your operational geography requires a browser and a clear understanding of what you are looking for — not a technical background. The analytical skill required is professional judgement, not coding.
What is the difference between an OSINT dashboard and an enterprise intelligence platform? Enterprise platforms like Flashpoint or Dataminr typically offer deeper source coverage, proprietary data, dedicated support, legal compliance guarantees, and integrated alert systems. Free OSINT tools offer comparable data layers for publicly available sources at no cost. The trade-off is coverage depth, support infrastructure, and the verification work your team must perform internally.
How do I define escalation criteria for OSINT signals? Start by mapping your risk landscape — the regions, sectors, and scenarios most relevant to your organisation. For each area, define what a meaningful signal looks like: a protest reaching a certain scale, an internet outage lasting beyond a defined threshold, a conflict event within a specific radius of your operations. Then define who receives the alert, who makes the call, and what the first response action is. Document it, test it, and update it quarterly.
Can smaller organisations or NGOs realistically benefit from these tools? Yes — and they may benefit most. NGOs operating in complex environments have historically lacked the budget for enterprise intelligence platforms. Free OSINT tools give them a level of situational awareness that was structurally unavailable five years ago. The governance disciplines required are the same regardless of organisation size.
What should a crisis professional do this week to get started? Open World Monitor and build a view of the geographic regions most relevant to your risk landscape. Spend thirty minutes exploring the data layers available. Then document three questions these tools raise for your existing crisis plans — and use those questions to open a conversation with your leadership team about what a structured OSINT capability could look like.
Philippe Borremans is a crisis communication specialist with 25 years of experience and founder of RiskComms. He publishes research and thought leadership through the Wag the Dog Newsletter at wagthedog.io.
Sources
Borremans, P. (2025, June 25). Is It Time for In-House OSINT Capabilities? Wag the Dog Newsletter. https://www.wagthedog.io/p/is-it-time-for-in-house-osint-capabilities
Dekens, N. (2025, February 12). What is OSINT [Open-Source Intelligence]? 2026 Guide. ShadowDragon. https://shadowdragon.io/blog/what-is-osint/
PHIL_HOFFELNER. (2025, July 31). Geopolitical early risk detection: How OSINT protects companies in real time. RocFortis Group. https://rocfortis.com/en/geopolitical-early-risk-detection-how-osint-protects-companies-in-real-time/