Completed
Bills and voting records from all 50 states and DC
Most civic tools cover Congress, which is the level of government that touches your life least often. State legislatures decide housing, health, schools and policing, and they're the hardest to follow. Our database now holds legislation from every state legislature and DC — hundreds of thousands of bills, together with millions of individual votes and the roll calls behind them. Keeping every state current automatically, and surfacing all of it fully in the app, is the work covered by "Every state, updated automatically" on this roadmap.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Bills and voting records from all 50 states and DC
Most civic tools cover Congress, which is the level of government that touches your life least often. State legislatures decide housing, health, schools and policing, and they're the hardest to follow. Our database now holds legislation from every state legislature and DC — hundreds of thousands of bills, together with millions of individual votes and the roll calls behind them. Keeping every state current automatically, and surfacing all of it fully in the app, is the work covered by "Every state, updated automatically" on this roadmap.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Public dashboards of the data behind the app
A tool that tells you what your government is doing should be willing to show its own work. The data behind cicada.guide is published in public dashboards at cicada.guide/data, and the counts on our homepage come from the live database rather than from a slide deck.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Public dashboards of the data behind the app
A tool that tells you what your government is doing should be willing to show its own work. The data behind cicada.guide is published in public dashboards at cicada.guide/data, and the counts on our homepage come from the live database rather than from a slide deck.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Install cicada.guide on your phone
Civic engagement shouldn't require a desktop, and it shouldn't require an app store either. cicada.guide is built mobile-first and installs to your home screen straight from the browser. It opens like an app, and the same account works on a laptop when you want a bigger screen.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Install cicada.guide on your phone
Civic engagement shouldn't require a desktop, and it shouldn't require an app store either. cicada.guide is built mobile-first and installs to your home screen straight from the browser. It opens like an app, and the same account works on a laptop when you want a bigger screen.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Elected Official Scorecard
"Do they represent me?" is the question underneath all of this, and it usually gets answered by party label because nothing better is available. Each representative gets a percentage score for how often their votes matched the positions you took, and you can open the score to see the individual votes behind it. Switch it between every bill and only the bills you track. The score reflects your values, not ours.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Elected Official Scorecard
"Do they represent me?" is the question underneath all of this, and it usually gets answered by party label because nothing better is available. Each representative gets a percentage score for how often their votes matched the positions you took, and you can open the score to see the individual votes behind it. Switch it between every bill and only the bills you track. The score reflects your values, not ours.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Look up any legislator and how they voted
Legislators' voting records are technically public and practically unreadable — buried in roll call documents that assume you already know which vote you're looking for. Every state legislator has a profile in cicada.guide showing their office and a timeline of the legislation they've acted on, so you can go bill by bill through what they actually did.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Look up any legislator and how they voted
Legislators' voting records are technically public and practically unreadable — buried in roll call documents that assume you already know which vote you're looking for. Every state legislator has a profile in cicada.guide showing their office and a timeline of the legislation they've acted on, so you can go bill by bill through what they actually did.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
In-app notifications when a tracked bill moves
Tracking a bill is only useful if something tells you when it changes. When a bill you're tracking progresses, cicada.guide notifies you inside the app. Getting those same updates by email, text, or push is still ahead of us — those are separate items on this roadmap.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
In-app notifications when a tracked bill moves
Tracking a bill is only useful if something tells you when it changes. When a bill you're tracking progresses, cicada.guide notifies you inside the app. Getting those same updates by email, text, or push is still ahead of us — those are separate items on this roadmap.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Track Legislation
Once you've found a bill you care about, the hard part is not losing it. Bills go quiet for weeks and then move fast. Star any bill to add it to Tracking, where you can see its current status and how far it has moved since you started following it.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Track Legislation
Once you've found a bill you care about, the hard part is not losing it. Bills go quiet for weeks and then move fast. Star any bill to add it to Tracking, where you can see its current status and how far it has moved since you started following it.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Discover Feed
Sometimes you don't want a personalized shortlist. You want to see everything moving in an area you follow. Discover is the straight feed: the newest legislation in the subjects you picked — housing, health, education, whatever you chose — with each bill's subject tags, status, and dates on the card.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Discover Feed
Sometimes you don't want a personalized shortlist. You want to see everything moving in an area you follow. Discover is the straight feed: the newest legislation in the subjects you picked — housing, health, education, whatever you chose — with each bill's subject tags, status, and dates on the card.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
For You Feed
Hundreds of bills get filed in a session. A handful of them touch your life, and finding those by reading the rest isn't realistic. For You surfaces new legislation matched to the subjects you chose and the positions you've taken, so the bills that concern you come to you instead of the other way around.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
For You Feed
Hundreds of bills get filed in a session. A handful of them touch your life, and finding those by reading the rest isn't realistic. For You surfaces new legislation matched to the subjects you chose and the positions you've taken, so the bills that concern you come to you instead of the other way around.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Turn your own words into a message to your legislator
Knowing how you feel about a bill and knowing how to write to a state senator about it are two different skills, and the second one keeps people from acting on the first. Say whether you support or oppose a bill and explain in your own words why it matters to you. cicada.guide drafts that into a clear message addressed to the right legislator. You read it, edit anything you want, and decide whether to send it — the words stay yours.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Turn your own words into a message to your legislator
Knowing how you feel about a bill and knowing how to write to a state senator about it are two different skills, and the second one keeps people from acting on the first. Say whether you support or oppose a bill and explain in your own words why it matters to you. cicada.guide drafts that into a clear message addressed to the right legislator. You read it, edit anything you want, and decide whether to send it — the words stay yours.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Find the representatives for your address
Most people don't know who represents them, and the usual answer — go look up your district — is exactly the step that stops people. cicada.guide resolves your representatives from where you live, using real district boundaries rather than a guess based on your city or county. Set your location once during setup and the right legislators follow you through the rest of the app.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Find the representatives for your address
Most people don't know who represents them, and the usual answer — go look up your district — is exactly the step that stops people. cicada.guide resolves your representatives from where you live, using real district boundaries rather than a guess based on your city or county. Set your location once during setup and the right legislators follow you through the rest of the app.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Tell us when a summary gets it wrong
Automated summaries make mistakes, and we'd rather hear about them than not. Summaries and answers carry a thumbs up and thumbs down, on bills and on constitutional provisions alike. That feedback comes back to us and feeds into how we improve summary quality.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Tell us when a summary gets it wrong
Automated summaries make mistakes, and we'd rather hear about them than not. Summaries and answers carry a thumbs up and thumbs down, on bills and on constitutional provisions alike. That feedback comes back to us and feeds into how we improve summary quality.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Understand your state constitution
State constitutions set the rules that legislation has to work within, and almost nobody reads them. They're long, old, and amended into near-unreadability. Every article of your state constitution has a plain-English summary, and you can ask questions about it the same way you can with a bill.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Understand your state constitution
State constitutions set the rules that legislation has to work within, and almost nobody reads them. They're long, old, and amended into near-unreadability. Every article of your state constitution has a plain-English summary, and you can ask questions about it the same way you can with a bill.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Ask questions about a bill
A summary tells you what a bill does in general. It doesn't tell you what it does to you. You can ask a bill your own questions — how it affects your situation, what an amendment actually changed, what a particular section means — and get an answer drawn from the text of the bill itself rather than from general knowledge about the topic.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Ask questions about a bill
A summary tells you what a bill does in general. It doesn't tell you what it does to you. You can ask a bill your own questions — how it affects your situation, what an amendment actually changed, what a particular section means — and get an answer drawn from the text of the bill itself rather than from general knowledge about the topic.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Read a plain-English summary of any bill
Bills are written for lawyers and lobbyists. A single bill can run dozens of pages of cross-references to code sections you'd have to look up separately just to know what changed. Every bill in cicada.guide has a plain-English summary that strips out the legal scaffolding and tells you what it does, in language you can read in under a minute. Summaries are generated ahead of time rather than on request, so they're there when you open the bill.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Completed
Read a plain-English summary of any bill
Bills are written for lawyers and lobbyists. A single bill can run dozens of pages of cross-references to code sections you'd have to look up separately just to know what changed. Every bill in cicada.guide has a plain-English summary that strips out the legal scaffolding and tells you what it does, in language you can read in under a minute. Summaries are generated ahead of time rather than on request, so they're there when you open the bill.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Get email updates on tracked bills
Bills move on the legislature's schedule, not yours. A bill can sit untouched for weeks and then get a committee vote on two days' notice. We want you to be able to mark the bills you care about and hear from us when something actually changes on them — a vote, a committee action, a change in status — so following a bill doesn't mean checking back on it yourself.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Get email updates on tracked bills
Bills move on the legislature's schedule, not yours. A bill can sit untouched for weeks and then get a committee vote on two days' notice. We want you to be able to mark the bills you care about and hear from us when something actually changes on them — a vote, a committee action, a change in status — so following a bill doesn't mean checking back on it yourself.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Keep a record of your contacts with legislators
People who engage with their legislature regularly lose track of their own history: who they wrote to, what they said, which meeting they attended, what a staffer told them on the phone last spring. We want a place inside cicada.guide to keep that record — your own log of conversations and meetings with legislators, so you can pick up a thread months later without starting from scratch.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Keep a record of your contacts with legislators
People who engage with their legislature regularly lose track of their own history: who they wrote to, what they said, which meeting they attended, what a staffer told them on the phone last spring. We want a place inside cicada.guide to keep that record — your own log of conversations and meetings with legislators, so you can pick up a thread months later without starting from scratch.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Planned
Help improve bill summaries
Our summaries are generated automatically, and automated summaries get things wrong — a nuance dropped, a provision misread, a bill made to sound simpler than it is. We want a way for people to suggest corrections and improvements to a summary, so the plain-English version of a bill gets better over time instead of staying as good as the day it was generated.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Planned
Help improve bill summaries
Our summaries are generated automatically, and automated summaries get things wrong — a nuance dropped, a provision misread, a bill made to sound simpler than it is. We want a way for people to suggest corrections and improvements to a summary, so the plain-English version of a bill gets better over time instead of staying as good as the day it was generated.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Connect bills to housing affordability
Housing costs are one of the most direct ways state policy shows up in people's lives, and one of the hardest to trace back to specific legislation. We want to connect bills to their likely effect on housing affordability, so when something moves through your legislature you can see whether it's the kind of thing that makes housing easier or harder to afford where you live.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Connect bills to housing affordability
Housing costs are one of the most direct ways state policy shows up in people's lives, and one of the hardest to trace back to specific legislation. We want to connect bills to their likely effect on housing affordability, so when something moves through your legislature you can see whether it's the kind of thing that makes housing easier or harder to afford where you live.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Get SMS Updates on Tracked Bills
When a bill you're tracking moves, we notify you inside the app — which only reaches you if you happen to open it. Legislative timing can be tight, and a committee vote scheduled for tomorrow morning is only useful to know about today. We want to add text messages as an option, so an update can reach you where you already are, with you in control of how much you get.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide
Get SMS Updates on Tracked Bills
When a bill you're tracking moves, we notify you inside the app — which only reaches you if you happen to open it. Legislative timing can be tight, and a committee vote scheduled for tomorrow morning is only useful to know about today. We want to add text messages as an option, so an update can reach you where you already are, with you in control of how much you get.
Forrest 7 days ago
Guide