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used in production should not harm their users aver the long-term. Work patterns should not lead to people getting indus-
trial illnesses. As in other industries, digital workers also need to advance their economic position as a group. Within cor-
porations, they must jointly negotiate their terms and conditions of employment. Within contract work, they must establish
industry agreements on rates for jobs and common business practices. Above all, data-processors and digital artisans
must develop political solidarity between each other as workers. They all have a common interest in ensuring that the
state advances the legal, welfare and other interests of employees rather than hinders them.

HOW CAN DIGITAL WORKERS ORGANISE TO ADVANCE THEIR COMMON INTERESTS?

For generations, workers formed trade unions to bargain with their employers and to campaign for political reforms. As in
other industries, workers in the emerging digital economy also need to defend their common interests. However, most of
the existing labour organisations are not responding quickly enough to the changes in people's working lives. Although
formed to fight the employers, industrial trade unions were also created in the image of the Fordist factory: bureaucratic,
centralised and nationalist. For those working within the digital economy, such labour organisations seem anachronistic.
Instead, new forms of unionism need to be developed which can represent the interests of digital workers. As well as re-
forming the structures of existing labour organisations, digital workers should start co-operating with each other using
their own methods. As they're already on-line, people could organise to advance their common interests through the Net.
Formed within the digital economy, a virtual trade union should emphasise new principles of labour organisation: arti-
sanal, networked and global.

INTERFUND

CREATE YOUR OWN SOLUTIONS
REPORT OF THE INTERFUND MEETING @ XCHANGE
UNLIMITED, RIGA NOVEMBER 29, 1998.

Braquayin}y 913

DURING THE XCHANGE UNLIMITED BALTIC NEW MEDIA CULTURE FESTIVAL IN RIGA A MEETING WAS HELD TO Dis-
CUSS THE CREATION OF THE INTERFUND. THE PARTICIPANTS WERE DIANA MCCARTY, RASA SMITE, MANU LUKSCH,

PIT SCHULTZ, AND OTHERS.

WHAT IS THE INTERFUND?

The Interfund does not actually exist yet. The Interfund should be many things at the same time, a self funding pro-
ject, a tool to create open spaces for sovereign experimentation in the digital networks, neither a network, nor a
community, it should be a means for collaboration and exchange. The Interfund was envisioned in Riga as a co-op-
erative, decentralised, non-located, virtual but real, self-support structure for small and independent initiatives in
the field of culture and digital media. What follows is a summary of the ideas that were discussed and the problems
raised in connection with the possible shape of the Interfund.

First of all the Interfund is an idea to create better ways to access funding and create funding possibilities of itself.
The Interfund can also act as a redistributor of financial resources from the affluent enclaves to the impecunious.

Funding and financing, however, is only one of the tools the Interfund will employ to achieve its aims. The Interfund
should rather act as a “Resource Pool”, shared by each of its members. These resources encompass a wide range
of tools: knowledge & know-how, skills (a.0. translations in local languages), software, open source development,
access to servers, especially for streaming media in the net, reserving bandwidth and protocols (for example the