By Kang-Xing Jin, VP, Engineering

Today we hosted our first-ever Facebook Communities Summit in Chicago with hundreds of group admins where we announced new features to support their communities on Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off by celebrating the role Groups play in the Facebook community and thanking the group admins who lead them. He also announced a new mission for Facebook that will guide our work over the next decade: Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

An important part of delivering on our new mission is supporting group admins, who are real community leaders on Facebook. We’re adding several new features to help them grow and manage their groups:

• Group Insights: group admins have told us consistently that having a better understanding of what’s going on in their groups would help them make decisions on how to best support their members. Now, with Group Insights, they’ll be able to see real-time metrics around growth, engagement and membership — such as the number of posts and times that members are most engaged.
• Membership request filtering: we also hear from admins that admitting new members is one of the most time-consuming things they do. So, we added a way for them to sort and filter membership requests on common categories like gender and location, and then accept or decline all at once.
• Removed member clean-up: to help keep their communities safe from bad actors, group admins can now remove a person and the content they’ve created within the group, including posts, comments and other people added to the group, in one step.
• Scheduled posts: group admins and moderators can create and conveniently schedule posts on a specific day and time.
• Group to group linking: we’re beginning to test group-to-group linking, which allows group admins to recommend similar or related groups to their members. This is just the beginning of ways that we’re helping bring communities and sub-communities closer together.

More than 1 billion people around the world use Groups, and more than 100 million people are members of “meaningful groups.” These are groups that quickly become the most important part of someone’s experience on Facebook. Today we’re setting a goal to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities like these.

In Chicago, we celebrated some of these groups built around local neighborhoods, shared passions and life experiences. For example, some of the groups and admins that attended include:

• Terri Hendricks, who started Lady Bikers of California so that women who ride motorcycles could connect with each other, meet in real life through group rides, and offer each other both motorcycle-related and personal support. Terri says that when she started riding motorcycles it was rare to see other women who rode and that across the group, there is “nothing that these ladies wouldn’t do for each other.”
• Matthew Mendoza, who started Affected by Addiction Support Group. The group is a safe space for people who are experiencing or recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as their friends and family, to offer support and share stories.
• Kenneth Goodwin, minister of Bethel Church in Decatur, Georgia, who uses the Bethel Original Free Will Baptist Church group to post announcements to the local community about everything happening at Bethel. He and the other admins will often share information about events, meeting times for their small group ministries, and live videos of sermons so people who cannot attend can watch from their homes.

We’re inspired by these stories and the hundreds of others we’ve heard from people attending today’s event. We’re planning more events to bring together group admins outside the US and look forward to sharing more details soon.