For eight years, I was the person you would have had to hire.
I analyzed legislation at one of California’s largest government relations law firms. I worked on statewide campaigns. I served as Information Officer for the California Department of Insurance. I learned which offices matter, when to engage, what to ask for, and how a decision takes shape long before the public hears about it.
That knowledge is worth a great deal. That is precisely the problem.
Government isn’t closed. It’s written in a language most people never learn, and it moves before most people know it’s moving. If you understand the process, you can be heard while it still matters. If you don’t, you arrive after the decision has hardened.
In 2001, LegalZoom showed me what an answer might look like. It took something that had always required a professional and put it in ordinary hands. I wanted the civic version: a way for anyone to understand an issue, make a serious case, and get it to the people who represent them, without hiring someone like me first.
I couldn’t build it. I wasn’t an engineer, had no money to hire one, and the tools that would eventually make it possible didn’t exist. The idea sat for almost twenty-five years.
Then my father got sick.
Stage 4 colon cancer. He moved from Panama to live with me and claim benefits he had earned over decades. Late in life, in an unfamiliar city, he faced a system that isn’t built for anyone coming to it cold.
He speaks English and spent nearly all of his career working for American companies. He still couldn’t have done it alone. I sat across from officials until the system gave him what he was owed. I knew how to do that. That is the only reason it worked.
Caring for him also narrowed my life to appointments, treatments, and long hours at home. I stopped waiting for a better time. In those hours, when AI tools finally made it possible, I built the thing I’d been carrying since 2001.
My father had someone who knew the system. Most people don’t.
Acta is that someone, for everyone. It runs nationally today, in English and Spanish, across more than 209,000 bills, 110,000 local officials, and more than 1,900 ballot measures. It helps you understand what’s actually being proposed, find the people who represent you, and write to them in your own words.
I’m not a developer. I never became one. What I had was eight years inside the process, a problem I couldn’t stop thinking about, and finally the tools to do something about it.
Acta doesn’t replace organizers, journalists, public servants, or advocates. It lowers the price of admission, measured in time, in knowledge, and in who you happen to know.
Because no one should need an insider to take part in the decisions that shape their life.
Miguel Silva
Founder, Acta
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.
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, and representatives, each one sourced from official bill and measure text, the legislative record, and the public sources cited in that brief. 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 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. The same flow can also draft a model bill, formatted legislation you can put in a lawmaker’s hands.
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.
One platform. Many doors.
One platform, with a door for everyone: citizens are free forever, organizations are the paying side, and nonprofits and educators come through their own doors.
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.
Legacy advocacy platforms point inward. Acta points outward. 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
- Campaign reporting
Acta also offers free or reduced-cost access for qualifying mission-driven nonprofits, and free classroom use for educators, 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.
Almost twenty-five years of waiting for the technology
The idea behind Acta is almost twenty-five years old.
In the early 2000s, working in public affairs, our 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 more than 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.
We are a small team. Miguel has worked as a legislative analyst, as an information officer for a state agency, and in institutional investment management. Eddie Bernacchi, our 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 State Capitol 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 those twenty-five years of waiting look like, finally built.
The principles behind every brief
Acta is built around several core principles:
We never sell your individual identity, and we collect no personal information from users under 16. Privacy is designed into how Acta works, not merely promised.
We believe trust must be earned structurally, not claimed rhetorically.
Where Acta is today
- 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