TL;DR: I built Events In Plain Sight because I got tired of hearing "Wait, roller derby is a thing? How do I find bouts to watch?" The answer should have been simple. It wasn't. So I spent seven years building a solution—first for derby, then for every community facing the same problem.
Google should have been able to tell people where roller derby events were happening.
By 2018 I'd been officiating roller derby around Ontario for three years. Between March and October, there were at least two roller derby events every single weekend within a four hour drive from Toronto. And I knew where to find them all. But when I traveled to Chicago, or San Francisco? I had no idea where to find games to watch. I'd end up scrolling through Facebook pages of leagues I'd never heard of, hoping someone had posted something recent.
If I, someone deeply involved in derby couldn't easily find derby events, what chance did casual fans or not-yet-fans have?
The simple answer is 'next to none.'
If only someone built something to help peoeple to find roller derby events. Turns out, that person is me...
#The First Attempt
I started building My Derby Diary in 2018 as part of my undergrad degree in entrepreneurship. The concept was simple: a crowd-sourced event directory where anyone in the roller derby community could add bouts, tournaments, and watch parties. If you knew about an event two cities over that I didn't, you could list it. No gatekeepers, no single person responsible for knowing everything.
I launched it in May 2019. Even got stickers made and a cool derby jacket with the logo.
Then COVID happened.
There are few less pandemic-friendly sports than roller derby—full contact, indoors, heavy breathing, close quarters. Everything stopped. For two years, My Derby Diary sat there with nothing to list.
#Rebooting Communities After A Pandemic Is Hard. (Who knew?)
When events started coming back in 2021 and 2022, something had shifted. Even people who used to know where to find derby couldn't anymore. The landscape had changed—leagues had folded, new ones had started, Facebook groups had gone dormant (billionaires amirite?) or moved.
Now the odds had moved from 'next to none' to 'less than none' for people finds events.
That's when I realized: this wasn't just a roller derby problem.
Drag shows. Burlesque performances. Rockabilly events. Magic: The Gathering tournaments. Puzzle competitions. Every community faces the same challenge -- events exist, people want to attend them, but discovery is broken because everything lives in walled gardens and private groups.
I officially retired from officiating in 2022 after seven years (well, five if you don't count the two we all lost for COVID) and 163 games. But I couldn't stop thinking about the problem.
#Building the Thing That Should Already Exist
In 2023, I started seriously rewriting My Derby Diary -- this time as a multi-tenant SaaS platform where any community could host their own event directory. What worked for roller derby could work for ballroom dancing, opera, local theater, or any other community struggling with the same discovery problem.
I built most of it during my master's program in entrepreneurship through 2024 and 2025, refining the business model, subscriptions, and crowd-sourced features. By November 2025, I was working on it full-time. In January 2026, I started taking registrations again.
That rewrite became Events In Plain Sight.
#What I'm Actually Trying to Solve
Here's what I believe down to my very core: a crowd-sourced event directory, run by the community and for the community, solves problems on both sides.
For people looking for events, it solves the discovery problem. Google should be able to tell you where roller derby bouts are happening this weekend. Or burlesque shows. Or ballroom competitions. The open web should work for this.
For organizers, it solves the visibility problem. You shouldn't have to rely on Facebook's algorithm or hope people stumble across your Instagram post. Your event should be findable by anyone searching for it. Again, this is what the open web excels at.
The original version of My Derby Diary was going to have an actual diary component; a place to record reflections on events you attended or participated in. Other plans included letting leagues build home pages, manage teams and practices, handle communications.
Will those become part of Events In Plain Sight? Likely not, as I'm focused on the core problem: event discovery.
#Starting Over (Again)
Last week, I started rebooting My Derby Diary by cleaning up Ontario data, seeding it with events and letting league organizers know it exists again. Now I just ('just') need to rinse and repeat for the rest of the country, continent and world. But it's live, it's functional, and it's solving the problem I set out to fix in 2018.
The tagline for My Derby Diary is still "Finding a roller derby adventure should be easy." Because it should be. And it should be for every other community.
Have a community that deserves better event discovery? Create your own community calendar and make it easy for people to find the events you care about. Event discovery should be easy.