Why we built Acta.
People shouldn’t have to be political insiders, policy experts, or activists to understand the issues affecting their communities, or to participate meaningfully in the democratic process.
But for most people, that’s exactly what civic engagement requires. Time. Expertise. Institutional familiarity. Access to information that isn’t built for them.
Acta was built to help turn frustration into informed action.
A note from our founder
Sooner or later, everyone hits a moment when something that matters to them, their health, their home, their family, runs into a system that wasn’t built with them in mind. Forms that assume you already know the answer. Offices that don’t talk to each other. Decisions made about you, in rooms you’re not in.
For the last two years, I’ve watched my father live through that moment.
He spent his career working for American companies, the first half here and the second half from Panama, and the benefits he earned over those decades were waiting for him in the United States. Reaching them meant leaving Panama, moving in with me, and, late in life in an unfamiliar city, taking on a system built to wear people down. I sat across the table from every official until it gave him what he had earned.
So I became his guide, his driver, his advocate, the person who made the system answer.
What stayed with me was simple: I knew how to do that. Years in public affairs put me inside the machinery of government and advocacy, and years in institutional investment taught me how the levers of capital and policy really move. My father had someone who spoke the language of the system. Most people don’t.
And the civic system, the one that quietly shapes what happens in our communities, is the hardest of all to face alone. People care deeply about what affects their families, but often don’t know where to start, who to contact, what to trust, or how to be heard.
Acta is that someone, for everyone. It takes what has always required an insider and puts it in your hands, so civic life is something you can understand, reach, and act on.
Because no one should need an insider to participate in the decisions that affect their life.
Miguel Silva, Founder, Acta
The information exists. The access does not.
Most people care deeply about something happening around them.
Housing.
Healthcare.
Education.
Affordability.
Public safety.
Issues affecting their communities, families, and daily lives.
But when people try to engage, the process often feels fragmented, confusing, partisan, overwhelming, or built for people who already understand how the system works.
At the same time, the decline of local journalism has created a growing civic information vacuum. Many Americans no longer have accessible, trusted, and understandable ways to follow legislation, ballot measures, elections, or local government decisions that directly affect their lives.
The information exists.
The access does not.
From information to coordinated action.
Acta is built for action. Action without information is noise, so it starts with information, and turns it into something you can do.
The information layer. AI-powered briefs on bills, ballot measures, candidates, and representatives, each one sourced from the Congressional Research Service, state legislative analyst offices, official voter guides, and the League of Women Voters. Every brief carries the same structure: what it does, the case for, the case against, the fiscal impact, what supporters and opponents say in their own words, and links to every source.
The action layer. From any brief, users can contact their representatives in one click, build a full grassroots campaign in minutes, then share it to rally their own neighbors and network behind it. The tools to turn shared concern into organized action are built into the platform, not bolted on.
Most civic tools stop at information. Most organizing tools assume you already know what you care about. Acta is built for the moment in between.
Two audiences. One platform.
Acta is built for two distinct audiences with one shared mission: making civic action accessible to everyone, and giving organizations the tools to mobilize the people they already serve.
Get informed and act.
A free, politically neutral tool to understand the issues you care about, find your real representatives, draft outreach, and build a grassroots campaign, without needing to be a policy expert or a political insider.
- AI-powered policy briefs
- Real representatives with contact info
- Personalized letter drafts
- Grassroots campaign playbook
Mobilize members. Understand priorities.
Acta helps unions, advocacy organizations, and campaigns mobilize members on the legislation that matters, understand what constituents care about beyond your priority list, and launch campaigns in days instead of months.
- Member benefit platform
- Legislative mobilization
- Aggregate engagement insights
- Real-time campaign reporting
Acta is also free for mission-driven nonprofits and for classrooms, see For Nonprofits and For Educators.
AI translates. Sources decide what’s true.
Acta’s AI analyzes official civic and governmental sources including:
The AI helps structure, summarize, and simplify complex information into readable, organized civic briefs.
Sources determine factual grounding.
Every brief includes source attribution.
Arguments from multiple perspectives are presented in their own words whenever possible.
Acta does not endorse candidates, political parties, or ideological positions.
Our goal is clarity, accessibility, transparency, and informed participation.
Twenty years of waiting for the technology.
The idea behind Acta is twenty years old.
In the early 2000s, working in public affairs, Acta’s founder, Miguel Silva, drafted a concept for making civic engagement accessible to anyone, a platform where any citizen could understand what was on their ballot, who represented them, and what they could do about it. Without an insider’s vocabulary. Without a partisan filter.
The technology wasn’t ready. For two decades, the idea sat.
Artificial intelligence has changed what’s possible. Briefs that once required a research staff can now be generated, sourced, and structured from official documents in minutes. The barrier wasn’t the demand for clear civic information. It was the cost of producing it at scale.
Acta is built by a small team. Its founder, Miguel Silva, has worked as a legislative analyst, as an information officer for a state agency, and in institutional investment management. Eddie Bernacchi, Acta’s Head of Strategic Partnerships, has spent his career as a public-affairs strategist and registered lobbyist in California, representing a broad range of industries at the State Capitol. He has spent years building the kind of relationships and running the kind of campaigns that actually move legislation, the work that usually happens far from public view and that most citizens never get access to. That insider fluency, on both the capital side and the political side, is exactly what Acta is built to hand to everyone. We built Acta because the gap between what civic insiders can do and what ordinary people can do was widening, not closing, and we took the tools we use professionally and rebuilt them as a free product for everyone.
Acta is what twenty years of waiting for the technology looks like, built now.
The principles behind every brief.
Acta is built around several core principles:
We believe trust must be earned structurally, not claimed rhetorically. We never sell your individual identity, and we collect no personal information from users under 16, privacy designed into how Acta works, not merely promised.
Where Acta is, and where it’s going.
- Representative lookup tools
- ZIP-code-based ballot and legislative views
- AI-generated bill summaries
- AI-generated ballot measure summaries
- Officeholder voting records
- Grassroots campaign playbook
- Curated civic briefs
- Source-linked civic analysis
- Action pathways tied to specific issues
- Personalized civic dashboards
- Civic alerts and issue tracking
- Expanded Take Action integrations
- Connecting people working on the same issue