Spectroscopic and photometric surveys of the Milky Way and its stellar
  clusters in the Gaia era
  This contribution to the Stellar Clusters & Associations: A RIA Workshop on
Gaia deals with surveys of stars, in particular spectroscopic surveys, with
attention to their impact on cluster studies, and their connectionwith Gaia. I
review some of the scientific reasons why we want large spectroscopic surveys,
what requirements these put on the instrumentation. Then I turn to a review of
the current and future instrumentation that will enable us to complement Gaia's
excellent distances and proper motions with the desired ground-based
spectroscopy to obtain additional radial velocities and elemental abundances of
high quality. This is a very fast moving area with several new surveys using
existing and future multi-object spectrographs on 4- and 8-meter telescopes. As
things change rapidly it is difficult to give adequate information on all these
projects, but with the inclusion of links to the relevant web-sites the reader
should be able to follow the latest developments as they unfold.
