This brief note reflects the exchanges that were made between the participants during the general discussion on the observing programs. Because of time constraints only two questions have been addressed: 1) What is the priority between large programs and detailed observations of one or only a few objects? 2) Large surveys implies some automatic pipelines: what is their reliability? Elements of answers are given below. One interesting unexpected outcome of this discussion was the realization that a recent and up-to-date textbook on spectral synthesis is missing, while it would be an extremely useful tool for the community.