Call your representative

The most common first action, and a good worked example of how the whole surface fits together.

1. Find out who they are

Enter your address or ZIP. The app resolves your districts and returns the people holding those seats.

2. Read the record before you call

This is the step that changes the call.

Open their record and look at the acts, not the award. Find something specific: a vote on an instrument you care about, an authorship, or — most usefully — something they blocked from advancing, since that is the part nobody ever asks them about.

3. Have one specific ask

Staff answering the phone log a topic and a position. What makes a call unusual is naming a specific instrument and a specific action.

"I am opposed to corruption" is logged as nothing.

"I am calling about the disclosure bill that was held in committee on [date]. I want to know why it was held, and I am asking for it to be scheduled." is a call the office has to have an answer to — and one they will notice if it arrives twenty times.

4. Ask something that produces a record

The most valuable version of this call requests something in writing. An answer you can cite becomes a source, and a source becomes a row in the movement's record.

A refusal to answer is also information, and is worth logging as what happened.

5. Log it

Title, description, and an evidence link — for a call, that might be a written response, a reference number, or your own contemporaneous note. Declare that the action was legal and ethical, attest, and submit.

6. What happens to it

It is reviewed, and if verified it scores — with its points frozen at verification, so a later catalog change never reprices your work.

Why the call matters even though one call is small

Because it is the only step in this whole product that reaches a person who can actually change the outcome. Everything upstream of it is preparation for a moment where a citizen who has done the reading asks a specific question that the office has to answer.