How Watchboard Works
What is Watchboard?
Watchboard is an open-source intelligence dashboard that tracks world events across multiple topics—from active military conflicts to political developments, economic crises, and cultural events. Each tracker is an independent dashboard with its own data, maps, 3D globe, and analysis.
The platform is designed for anyone who wants structured, sourced, and transparent reporting on complex ongoing situations. Rather than presenting a single narrative, Watchboard surfaces data from multiple perspectives and lets readers evaluate credibility through explicit source tier classifications.
Automated Data Pipeline
Every day at 14:00 UTC, an AI-powered pipeline updates all active trackers. The process runs through six stages, each with built-in safeguards to prevent bad data from reaching the published site.
Determines which trackers are due for update based on their configured interval. A tracker set to update every 3 days will not run again until its window opens.
Generates a manifest of event gaps—missing days in the timeline—and cross-references related trackers to avoid duplication across overlapping topics.
Each tracker runs in parallel with its own AI agent that searches the web, verifies sources against known outlets, and updates the data files with new events, KPIs, and analysis.
All data passes through Zod schema validation. If structural errors are found, a fix agent automatically corrects them before the data is accepted.
The entire site is built from scratch to catch any runtime errors before committing. If the build fails, the update is rejected and no data reaches production.
Every run—pass or fail—is recorded to the ingestion metrics dashboard, providing full auditability of the pipeline’s health over time.
Data Quality & Source Tiers
Every data point in Watchboard carries a source tier classification. This system is the backbone of the platform’s commitment to transparency: readers should always know where information comes from and how reliable it is likely to be.
OSINT confirmation rule: an event is marked “confirmed” when it has at least 1 Tier-1 source or 2 or more independent Tier-2 sources. Single-source Tier-3 or Tier-4 reports remain flagged as unconfirmed.
Casualty figures include a contested classification—yes, no, evolving, or heavily—to explicitly flag disputed numbers rather than presenting any single estimate as authoritative.
Cross-Tracker Intelligence
Related trackers are aware of each other. Before updating, each tracker receives a “sibling brief”—a summary of what related trackers already cover. This prevents event duplication across overlapping topics. For example, a drone strike reported in both the Iran Conflict and a regional theater tracker will only appear in whichever topic it most directly belongs to, with a cross-reference in the other.
This sibling awareness system also enables richer context: when a political development in one tracker has downstream effects on another, the pipeline can surface that connection without duplicating the underlying data.
Schema Enforcement
All data is validated against strict Zod schemas before it enters the system. These schemas enforce structural and semantic constraints that prevent common data quality issues:
- No future dates allowed—events cannot be dated ahead of the current day
- Strike and retaliation map entries require weapon type and timestamp
- Source poles must be one of:
western,middle_eastern,eastern, orinternational - Economic indicators must include directional trends (up or down)
- Every event must have an ID, year, title, detail text, and at least one source
- Map coordinates are validated against the tracker’s configured geographic bounds
When the AI updater produces data that fails validation, a dedicated fix agent reads the error messages, identifies the root cause, and corrects the data automatically. If the fix agent also fails, the entire update is rejected.
Transparency
Watchboard is built on the principle that intelligence tools are only useful if you can verify how they work. Everything about this platform is open and auditable.
- Ingestion metrics—View run history, success rates, and validation errors on the Status dashboard
- Open source—Full source code, data files, and update history available on GitHub
- RSS feeds—Subscribe to per-tracker or global feeds for update notifications
- Changelog—Every data update is committed to git with a full diff, so you can see exactly what changed and when