Groundswell

• 

  NYC Suggestions from X Pedestrian-First street RedesignCluster

Inspiration

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root" ~Thoreau X.com is full of excellent posts with ideas about how to improve society, but it's not easy to tell which ones speak to a broader trend or are merely happening today. If there were a way to understand the landscape of idea space, politicians trying to improve and engage a city could immediately know what would strike a chord. CEO's of companies with millions of users could quickly understand what their users are complaining about in their product. With the power of X API and Grok, now they can, from the worlds richest data source of such feedback, X.com, and have the perspective to strike at the root of people's problems instead of the branches, inspiring unprecedented voter/user excitement.

What it does

We semantically search X for posts about how to improve a city, a product, or any topic, and then use AI to cluster related ideas, complaints, etc., in a graph view so that we can identify the most effective underlying ways to solve those issues.

Great for politicians, looking to find out how to engage their constituents with policy proposals, and companies looking at how to please their users. Also can generate startup ideas.

We used it to create clusters of suggestions to improve New York City, Boston, the iPhone, and also just to harvest general startup ideas that many people have been tweeting about, indicating lots of demand. We think it could be extremely useful for need finding as well and user research for startup discovery. And generating hackathon ideas! We found some awesome ones.

It also produces a consolidated written report that a leader can quickly use to make sense of a summary of the graph.

How we built it

We built a frontend graph explorer with a real-time sidebar chat, where users can type natural-language prompts like “Find all local problems in San Francisco” and immediately see the graph update. On the backend, we used Grok to determine the right X API endpoints, search parameters, and filters for each query, then passed all retrieved posts through semantic embedding + clustering pipelines. The graph itself is generated with dynamic force-layout visualization, allowing clusters to grow as users add more prompts. We also created an auto-generated written report pipeline that summarizes each cluster and its core insights using LLMs.

Challenges we ran into

We built in a sidebar, you could continually add to the graph like cursor by querying the Grok API. There were server issues and very slow performance for most of the night even though I'm the fastest model, for unexplained reasons. But we still got it done!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a fully functioning “idea landscape analyzer” in a single hackathon night, complete with querying, clustering, graph visualization, and auto-generated reports. We’re proud that the tool actually revealed meaningful, non-obvious insights about NYC, Boston, and the iPhone that weren’t visible in raw timelines. We also discovered legitimate startup ideas tweeted across thousands of users, proving the tool works for real need-finding. And our graph UI feels surprisingly polished for something built under time pressure.

What we learned

We learned how powerful idea clustering can be when paired with real-time public discourse: people are already posting the raw ingredients for policy, product improvements, and innovation, they just need structure. We also learned a ton about Grok’s retrieval patterns, X API quirks, and how to build a flexible graph-based interface that can grow organically with each query. Most importantly, we realized that the biggest pain isn’t lack of ideas, it’s lack of visibility into which ones resonate at scale.

What's next for Groundswell

Create an issue tracker for society for every major city. Integrate Grokipedia context. Suggest Grokipedia entry edits from the most significant issues in various areas. Turn this into a living issue tracker for society so that people can see when their X posts are being acknowledged and acted upon and the world can seamlessly be improved by what we post.

Built With

• grok
• xapi