In a world of social media users sharing fake news and articles they haven't read--and a president who hates the media--it can pay to go directly to the source. By providing a digital archive of "all statements made in state legislative hearings," Digital Democracy allows people to do just that. The organization provides both videos and transcripts of the hearings -- all on a completely searchable platform. "These data rich transcripts represent an entirely new universe of information previously unavailable to the public," according to Digital Democracy. Right now, transcripts are available only for state legislatures in California (since 2015) and, as of February 6, 2017, New York.

No one knows better than Sam Blakeslee that your elected officials operate in the shadows. No one is sure what they do or what they say. He knows because he used to be one of them. As a Republican state senator and assemblyman in California, Blakeslee worked on negotiating the state budget and drafting bills around the energy sector and lobbying reform. And he did it--as did his fellow legislators--far from the prying eyes of the very people he was representing.

Retirees who lost big in the 2008 financial crisis have good reason to worry about President Trump's new rollbacks of Wall Street regulations. In an executive order issued today, Trump sought to undo parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank act, which curbed some of the finance industry's most egregious recession-spawning practices. In a separate memo, the president ordered a review of the "fiduciary duty rule," which requires retirement fund investors to act in the best interests of their clients. The Wall St bankers may be popping champagne, but Americans haven't forgotten the 2008 financial crisis – and they won't forget today. The opposition may have an unlikely ally in this fight: fintech, the segment of the tech industry trying to automate away so much of what Wall Street does.