Digital and Population Data Services Agency and Lähellä.fi network have developed together an integration, and now the activity announcements added to the Lähellä.fi online portal are also visible in the Suomi.fi web service. Suomi.fi is a national centralized database that is used as a data source in, for example, several public sector systems. The purpose of the cooperation between the Lähellä.fi network and the Digital and Population Data Services Agency is to make the activities of the NGOs more visible, and the integration between the services makes it possible.
With the integration, the basic information of the organizations will be transferred from the Lähellä.fi online portal to the Suomi.fi web service. In addition, announcements in the ”Support and help” and ”Hobbies and free time” categories, where long-term activities are announced, will be transferred. Contact information related to announcements will also be transferred. The information is transferred automatically, which means that organizations do not have to separately add information to the Suomi.fi web service. However, the data is only transferred one way from the Lähellä.fi portal to the Suomi.fi database, not the other way around.
Minimum requirements for data transfer
The information added in the Lähellä.fi online service must meet certain minimum requirements to be transferred to the Suomi.fi web service. The minimum requirements for data transfer are as follows:
- The integration only applies to long-term activities. Short-term activities are not transferred to the Suomi.fi web service.
- The Business ID must be entered in the field reserved for it in the Lähellä.fi online service.
- The information has been entered by the form’s instructions and in the correct fields.
Organizations can choose which service they want to use to announce their activities. From the point of view of the organizers, entering data into the Lähellä.fi online service is a little easier. This benefits organizations that have limited resources for communication.
The organization can also use both services in parallel if it wishes. The information that is already added to the Suomi.fi database prevents the transfer of data from Lähellä.fi, so the same data cannot be entered into both services. In practice, this means that long-term activities can be added to the Suomi.fi service database and short-term and voluntary activities in Lähellä.fi. You can find more information about the differences between the services at: https://www.lahella.fi/lahellafi-ja-ptv (in Finnish)
Lähellä.fi portal is at the moment available in Finnish, but you can announce activities that are organized in other languages, too.
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