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First of all, we want to thank all our colleagues and stakeholders from Estonia, Finland, Norway and Åland for the fruitful discussions about cross-border information exchange! Here is a summary of the topics and results of the workshop, which was held as a part of the Achieving the Smoothest Cross Border Mobility and Daily Life Through Digitalisation project's seminar of national experts in Helsinki on 13 October 2022.

To spark the discussion, we introduced a stakeholder map. It has been constructed from our project's perspective to help us in visualising central actors, networks and solutions and their interdependencies in the field of digitalisation and cross-border data exchange on European, Nordic-Baltic and national level (Finland).  We got valuable observations about e.g. to consider adding a layer of use case perspective.  Also, eDelivery was brought up to the discussion and is now placed on the map. By building with eDelivery, public and private organizations from different sectors can easily create a safe and interoperable channel to transfer documents and data among each other over a public or private network (read more here).

In the second part of the workshop participants gave input to the handbook on cross-border data exchange. Keeping the EIF (European Interoperability Framework) in mind, the challenges and solutions were brought up especially from the point of view of individual identification and cross-border data transfer. The participants identified at least following challenges:

• cross-border identity matching
• legislative changes are slow
• there is no standard that everyone uses
• sufficient resources are lacking
• national solutions are not tailored to cross-border data exchange.

In addition to the previous, data is in different places, in different format, and in different languages. Luckily, there are also solutions which tackle some of the challenges, e.g.  European Digital Identity Wallet, eDelivery, X-Road, EMREX, Single Digital Gateway Once Only Technical System, European Data Spaces, and Gaia-X. Just to mention a few of them.

Reflecting on the key takeaways from the seminar day, we can only say that we have similar challenges in each country and we need coordination that is not only cross-border, but also cross-sectoral. We naturally need clear and common goals, and we should better recognize our common capabilities. In addition, it is always good to get a status update and information about what is going on in neighboring countries and regions.

Next steps

1. We will continue investigating the expansion of already existing networks e.g. EMREX
2. The feasibility of machine translation will be studied in 2022, and it will also be examined which machine translation tools could be useful in the translation of study record data e.g. learning outcomes (read more here).
3. Cost-benefit analysis 

You can find more detailed information and project related material on the right column of this page. See also the picture below that captures nicely the workshop. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, comments or ideas for further collaboration.

– Project Manager Riikka Rissanen and Specialist Petteri Pulli

Seminar and Workshop in Helsinki, 13th October 2022

• Workshop Material (pdf)
• Seminar for national experts in Helsinki, Finland 13th October | Workshop - World’s Smoothest Cross-Border Mobility and Daily Life Through Digitalisation - DVV external Confluence
• Recording: Opening session of the seminar

External links

• Project Introduction
• Finland to promote digitalisation during its 2021 Presidency of Nordic Council of Ministers
• Finnish National Agency for Education promotes the mobility of students’ achievement records in the Nordic and Baltic countries
• Webinar: Ways of electronically sharing student data (44:50 →)
• European Interoperability Framework (EIF): legal, organisational, semantic, and technical interoperability