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cicada.guide

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.

In Review

Guide

Understand your state constitution

Forrest

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.

Get email updates on tracked bills

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.

Keep a record of your contacts with legislators

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.

Connect bills to housing affordability

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.

Get SMS Updates on Tracked Bills

Not everyone has time to sit and read. We want to turn a bill into a short spoken explainer you can listen to on a commute or a walk.The longer version of this: a playlist built from the bills we're already recommending to you, so you can catch up on everything relevant in one sitting without opening the app.

Listen to a bill instead of reading it

When a story is in the news, the legislation behind it is often already moving — and almost nobody connects the two.We want to match what's being reported against what's being filed, and surface the bills that connect to stories you're already hearing about.

Surface the bills behind the news

Individual bills are easy to follow one at a time. The shape of a whole legislative session is harder to see.A session dashboard would show what your legislature has actually done: what passed in the last thirty days, how the session's bills break down by status, and a running list of what became law.

See how your legislature's session is going

Writing to your representative is easy to do once and hard to keep track of. A week later, most people have forgotten whether anyone wrote back.We want to check in a week after you send a message and ask a simple question: did they respond? Your answers would build a public record of how often each representative actually replies to constituents.That record doesn't exist anywhere right now, and we think it should.

Track whether your representative wrote back

Right now, finding a bill means guessing the words the legislature used. If a bill about rent increases is written entirely in terms of "residential lease agreements," a search for "rent" may not surface it.We're working on search that understands meaning alongside exact wording, so you can describe what you care about in your own words and still find the right bills.Currently being scoped.

Search bills by meaning, not just keywords

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.

Planned

Help improve bill summaries

Every state legislature publishes its bills differently, so supporting a new state means building a new pipeline for it — fetching the bills, reading the documents, and tracking each bill's status through that state's particular process.The goal is full coverage: every state legislature, updated automatically, so anyone can follow what their own lawmakers are doing regardless of where they live.This is a longer-term effort and isn't actively being built yet.

Every state, updated automatically

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.

Completed

Bills and voting records from all 50 states and DC

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.

Public dashboards of the data behind the app

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.

Install cicada.guide on your phone

"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.

Elected Official Scorecard

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.

Look up any legislator and how they voted

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.

In-app notifications when a tracked bill moves

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.

Track Legislation

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.

Discover 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.

For You Feed

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.

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