TL;DR: If you're the only person who can add events to your community calendar, you're gatekeeping—whether you mean to or not. Every event you "forget" to list, every organizer you make jump through hoops, every personal grudge that keeps something off the calendar is shrinking your community. Open calendars build communities. Closed ones kill them.
Here's an uncomfortable question: Who decides which events in your community get visibility?
If the answer is "one person" or "just our core team," you have a gatekeeping problem. And it's costing your community more than you think.
#What Gatekeeping Actually Looks Like
Gatekeeping isn't always obvious. Sometimes it looks like:
The well-meaning coordinator who runs the community calendar but "doesn't have time" to add that new organizer's event—the one they've never worked with before.
The established organization that maintains the "official" event listing but somehow never remembers to include the upstart group doing similar work across town.
The longtime community member who personally approves every calendar submission and mysteriously finds reasons to reject events from people they don't like.
The busy volunteer who genuinely forgot to add half a dozen events because they were the only one responsible for keeping the calendar updated.
Some of this is intentional. Most of it isn't. But the effect is the same: events that should be discoverable aren't, and communities stay smaller than they could be.
#The Rationalization Playbook
We've heard every justification for keeping event calendars closed:
"We need quality control."
Translation: We don't trust our community to know what's worth attending.
"It's easier if one person manages it."
Translation: We'd rather have an incomplete calendar than share control.
"We can't promote our competitors."
Translation: We think this is a zero-sum game where someone else's success hurts us.
"What if someone posts something inappropriate?"
Translation: We'd rather have no events than risk one bad listing.
Here's the thing—some of these concerns are real. Reputational risk matters. Spam and inappropriate content are legitimate problems. But using those concerns as an excuse to control everything is gatekeeping dressed up as responsibility.
#When Gatekeeping Is Actually Required
Let's be clear: there are legitimate cases where moderation matters. If you're running a calendar on behalf of a brand, or curating highly specialized content, some oversight makes sense.
But moderation tools exist for exactly this reason. You can have an open calendar where anyone can submit events AND still moderate what gets published. You can review submissions, remove spam, and handle violations without making yourself the sole arbiter of what counts.
The question isn't whether you need some control—it's whether you're using that need as cover for keeping others out.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
When you gatekeep your community calendar, here's what you lose:
Discovery: That amazing event two towns over stays invisible because the organizer didn't know to tell you, or tried once and gave up.
Growth: New organizers see your closed calendar and decide your community isn't welcoming. They fragment the audience by starting their own thing elsewhere.
Resilience: When you're the only one maintaining the calendar, it dies when you get busy, burnt out, or move on.
Trust: People notice when events mysteriously don't make the list. That erodes trust faster than almost anything else.
The network effect: Every unlisted event is a missed connection. Someone who would have discovered your community never shows up.
You're not protecting your community by controlling the calendar. You're suffocating it.
#The "Rival Organizer" Problem
Let's address the elephant in the room: competing organizers in the same community.
Maybe there's another dance company doing similar work. Another league in the same sport. Another theater group performing the same kinds of shows. And you're supposed to promote their events on your calendar?
Yes. Absolutely yes.
Here's what most gatekeepers don't understand: your community is not your property. The people who attend ballroom dancing events, roller derby bouts, or community theater shows—they don't belong to you. They belong to themselves.
They want to see good events. They don't care about your turf wars.
When you list a rival's event alongside yours, you're not helping your competition—you're serving your community. You're saying "we care more about this scene thriving than about controlling it." And people notice that.
Plus, here's the secret: a rising tide lifts all boats. When someone discovers roller derby through another league's event and falls in love with the sport, they're more likely to check out your bouts too. When the ballroom scene is thriving citywide, everyone benefits from the increased interest.
Gatekeeping because you're worried about competition is the fastest way to ensure your community never grows beyond your existing circle.
#What Open Actually Looks Like
An open community calendar doesn't mean chaos. It means:
- Anyone can submit events without waiting for approval from a single person
- Organizers across the community can add their own events directly
- Moderation tools exist to handle spam, duplicates, or genuinely inappropriate content
- The community decides what's valuable by showing up—not one person deciding what deserves visibility
This is how grassroots communities actually work in real life. People share information. They cross-promote. They help each other succeed because they understand that a healthy scene benefits everyone.
Your calendar should reflect that reality—not recreate the hierarchies and politics that make communities toxic.
#Challenge the Gatekeepers
If you're thinking of a community calendar controlled by one person or closed group, ask: Why?
Why can't organizers add their own events? Why does everything need approval? Why isn't the full picture of what's happening visible in one place?
And if you're the one running a closed calendar—ask yourself honestly: Are you gatekeeping?
Is there a good reason that event didn't make the calendar, or did you just not get around to it? Did you really need to verify credentials, or do you just not like them? Is quality control the issue, or is it control itself?
#By the Community, For the Community
Events In Plain Sight was built on a simple idea: community event calendars should be maintained by the community, not controlled by gatekeepers.
That means crowd-sourced event submissions. Anyone in your community can add events—not just you or your approved list. And yes, that means your rival organizer can list their events right alongside yours.
We built moderation tools for the legitimate cases where oversight matters. You can review submissions if you need to. You can remove spam. You can handle the actual problems.
But you can't use those tools as an excuse to control who gets visibility. That's not moderation—that's gatekeeping.
Ready to open your doors? Sign up to create a community calendar where everyone can contribute—and let your whole community decide what events matter. Finding events should not be hard. Listing them shouldn't be either.