‘Becoming Vincent’. A multifaceted story in a multifaceted ecosystem.

This chapter presents the process that led to the development of a virtual experience for the church in Etten-Leur, which is part of the heritage related to Vincent van Gogh and which hosts a permanent exhibition related to the artist’s life in the area. As such, it is one of the elements in the Becoming Vincent project. This chapter highlights the complexity of the heritage ecosystem underlying the project, consisting of various stakeholders with diverse, sometimes diverging or even incompatible, interests and goals. In this chapter, we discuss how we coped with this diversity and we draw some of the lessons we learnt from this process for future use. The most important lesson is the need to involve all stakeholders from the start of the process and to treat them equally, despite visible differences in their relative interest in the outcome of the project, in order to give them the feeling to have ownership on the expected outcome, and therefore to enhance the chances that they will still support the project after its completion. At the same time, it is important to keep the network structure simple and clear in order to avoid unnecessary or redundant passages in the knowledge transmission within this web of relations. While not specific for museums but prone to be applied to any complex networked situation, this approach has helped us cope with a complex cultural ecosystem.