Its been six months since GDELT opened in its new home, supported by Google Ideas, and what an incredible six months it has been! Sometime in the coming week GDELT will reach an astounding milestone: 1 million downloads!

It is incredibly humbling to be able to create a project that is used by so many people around the world each day and it has been just amazing to watch the global user community of GDELT grow at such a staggering rate. It’s not every day that one of your projects ends up being downloaded almost a million times or reshapes an entire field of research. Creating the first open realtime global event data platform ever built has presented an incredible number of breathtaking challenges, but reaching milestones like this makes it all worthwhile.

From the new Global Conflict Dashboard to the Patterns of World History, GDELT continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Later this fall GDELT will be debuting its next major evolution: an incredible new global dataset that will make it possible to begin to understand the background and context behind today’s events, so stay tuned!

Thank you all for making GDELT such an incredible success. Here’s to the next million downloads!