Politicans around the world have long paid lip-service to the topic of teledemocracy, but a group of Austrian school students has put this promise into practice. Here the management of the database, the treatment of the problem of data protection, the impeccably designed web page, and especially the aspect of a democratic self-initiative illustrate the possibilities of social cooperation through networks.

As we discovered for ourselves this year, the election of a school representative is an extremely complicated matter. From the preparation of the ballots to the tedious counting, the organization is nothing but an ordeal.
This led us to the decision to completely automate school representative elections. With databases, tables and countless working hours, we created a system that turns conducting school representative elections into a brief process: from entering the candidates via the virtual ballot to the output of all the results, the entire election process is displayed and conducted in a client-server environment on the Internet.
The technical demands that we faced with enthusiasm were over a thousand lines of code in a language (PHP) new to us, in conjunction with a high performance database link with fantastic possibilities, and learning animated web design with flash.
The high intensity of the work and the huge investment of time have already proven worthwhile, and our efforts have been rewarded with the complete functionality of the election program and the page itself.