Museums and other heritage institutions often invite their visitors to contribute content to museum collections and exhibitions for a variety of purposes: to gather feedback and assess the effectiveness of their exhibitions, to enrich their collections with first-hand accounts of experiences with their objects, or simply to engage their audiences in interactions with their contents at a deeper level. Such examples date almost a century back, however, the whole notion of visitor-generated content has taken on completely new meaning with the advent of the social web. Users of the social web (including social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc.) increasingly expect to be asked for their opinions and comments and to be offered opportunities to actively contribute rather than passively consume online content. Heritage institutions are already responding to this with a variety of projects that seek content from their online and/or on-site audiences. However, the sector yet lacks best practices for these projects to draw upon in order to tackle the many ethical and practical challenges of soliciting, using and disposing of visitor content. It is now critical to bring these projects together under a dedicated and structured forum to exchange experiences, to identify critical issues and challenges, to map future research agendas, and to encourage good practice. This network will provide this forum through four structured events, which will focus on the following topics: - The Shape of Things: New and Emerging Technology-Enabled Models of Participation through visitor-generated content - "It's my content 2.0" - IPR, ownership and ethics - "But it's my content too" - Democracy, trust and moderation - The Shape of Things to Come The events are intended to delineate and advance the debate over visitor-generated content versus institutional content as well as to unveil possible synergies. In doing so, they will contribute significantly to our understanding of the issues and challenges involved in integrating visitor content within heritage institutions, and will advance our practices and approaches.