The situation monitoring group keeps track of attack and air raid alerts and other urgent news coming out of Ukraine. Other SUCHO volunteer groups use this information to prioritize sites to capture, when particular locations are imminently at risk.
Alerts and news are displayed using your local time zone, but we’re keeping track of them using UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). Look at what the current time is in UTC, and work out the difference between UTC and yoru time zone.
If you’re on a Mac, the Status Clock app provides a second clock in the toolbar where UTC is the default.
The link to the SUCHO status tracking sheet is pinned in the #situation-monitoring Slack channel. Open it, and check for the most recent status (at the top of the sheet). Translate the time indicated into your local time. (E.g. a status with the timestamp 23:14 corresponds to 4:14 PM in California.)
Ukraine NOW is an active Telegram news feed that has the latest alerts. (Telegram is another platform, kind of like Slack or Discord, but there’s optionally a web-viewable feed – that’s what we’re looking at here.)
Scroll to the bottom of the Ukraine NOW page, where the newest updates get posted, then scroll up a little until you find the Ukraine NOW update that corresponds to the most recent thing in the SUCHO situation monitoring spreadsheet. (e.g. for the example above, if I’m in California, I’d want to look for an update with a timestamp of 16:14, corresponding to 4:14 PM in California or 23:14 UTC.)
You may want to use the Google Translate Chrome plugin to machine-translate Ukraine NOW. The updates we’re particularly paying attention to usually begin with the characters “‼️” in red, then the name of a city, province, or region, and then “тривога” (alert) or “повітряна тривога” (air raid alert).
Add any new updates that have come in, as new rows at the top of the SUCHO situation monitoring sheet. All things being equal, include the transliteration from Google Translate along with the original Cyrillic, if possible.
Go to the Browsertrix tab (which is currently our best and most comprehensive list) and look for sites that have not been marked as complete or in progress, where the site title or URL includes the name of the place(s) currently under alert. Post in the #browsertrix and/or #browsertrix-cloud channels (using @here to alert people who are online) about which spreadsheet rows have sites that are imminently under threat.
The Ukraine NOW site doesn’t automatically refresh itself when new alerts are added, so if you’re working on situation monitoring, don’t forget to refresh periodically.