History:

In the summer of 1997, Sean and Silver started up an email list targeted to the gothics of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. They had met each other on the Texas regional gothic list, the SWGoths (Southwest Gothics), and became friends once Silver moved up to DFW from Central Texas. Both of them noticed that there seemed very poor representation of Dallasites on the SWgothlist (considering that the city hosted the longest-running gothclub in the state -- The Church), and they started making inquiries to see why this was. They quickly ascertained that a good number of Dallas-area goths had net access, but didn't join SWgoth out of the perception that the regional list contained mention primarily of Austin events. Silver persuaded the SWgothlist host, Mr.Bill, to set up a side list for use by the Dallas gothics, despite Bill's previous nonsuccessful attempts at getting other city lists to operate as well as SWgoth.

The list grew slowly at first, but by the end of the first year of operation there were around 140 members. More importantly, dialogues about improving the gothic scene of the area had begun, and members sought ways of improving the number and quality of events available.

At this point, hosting of the list had been moved to Silver's Necronom.com server to improve his and Sean's ability to maintain the list. This had followed in the wake of a brief outage when Mr. Bill changed jobs and was unable to provide service for a short while.

1999 Changes:

Sean and Silver have now decided that operation of the Dallas Gothics List (DGL) needs a change. The list membership has exceeded 300 email addresses, and their ability and desire to handle all requests coming through has not kept up adequately. While the demands upon their time have increased, their personal time available for working on the list and website has, if anything, decreased.

They reviewed options for fixing this state of affairs and hit upon an idea: turn the list administration over to a committee. This concept satisfies a long list of needs. They can reduce the demands on their time somewhat; increase the ability to handle list issues; solve the problem of what happens when admins are out of touch while traveling; give the membership a more democratic oversight; empower others to have greater influence within the community; distribute the duties among a handful of people so that it isn't burdensome upon anyone; and broaden the scope of services offered, perhaps.
 

To this end, they invited a number of individuals they earmarked as having a beneficial influence upon the gothic scene of the Metroplex. They sought out members who were experienced, technically skilled, or were good organizers, and who had expressed an interest in assisting in some way in the past. Thus The Cabal was born.

The email list itself has been moved to a commercially-hosted provider as a strategy to preserve longrange viability: the list hosting doesn't depend upon any one person -- a situation which has caused past outages and which makes the list existence depend upon one or two individual's stability and circustance.

Currently, The Cabal are comprised of the following:
 

The Cabal may be reached collectively by sending an email note to:
dallasgoths-owner@yahoogroups.com

A seat on The Cabal is not an honorary position, but a service position and no Cabal members receive any sort of benefits other than whatever you provide. (We all accept free cds, however, so be sure to send us some.) The Cabal will seek out new committee members according to our own agenda. We may seek more representation at our table as membership increases or if a substantial number of Cabal members resign or take sabbaticles from serving.

Pax Vobiscum