irishpolyglot:So that's the question I should be asking: at what point should I make it such that someone would be part of the Esperanto community to receive such questions? If they have an A2+ spoken level, and have spent at least a couple of hours using the language with another person (in person or online)?

One problematic issue is that Esperanto speakers aren't good about estimating their level.

Sometimes it seems to me that a person's actual talent with the language is in inverse proportion to their actual mastery of the material. I can't tell you how many talented students I've had who were convinced that their Esperanto was rubbish because they still made a few errors (thought they got the vast majority right), and how many un-talented students pushed ahead with courses at a higher and higher level, though they had no mastery whatsoever of the fundamentals.

(Also, Esperanto speakers outside Europe may not be familiar with the CEFR/KER levels, so they will have no idea what A2 means)

irishpolyglot:So that's the question I should be asking: at what point should I make it such that someone would be part of the Esperanto community to receive such questions? If they have an A2+ spoken level, and have spent at least a couple of hours using the language with another person (in person or online)?

Surely you can have a "core" part of the survey that hopefully most people answer and then various options, including questions about Esperanto.

In the optional sections, people can answer questions about their level of fluency in the language. You could filter that however you wanted after the event. "x people with a (self-assessed) fluency greater than y said they got into Esperanto because they liked the funny green man they saw on a web-site"; "N percentage of people with lower than M proficiency blamed being from Australia for being mono-lingual" (I can make this joke, I'm Australian and fairly close to being a monoglot); "Q percent of everyone that answered the Esperanto sub-survey claimed to be anarcho-capitalist, god-fearing atheists"

Maybe I just want to be able to answer questions about Esperanto even though I have no real fluency. Perhaps I'm just being an its-about-me-bot? Anyway, you're overseeing the design of the survey Benny and you've got a lot of factors to weigh up, so I just realised I should probably shut up. Like your idea. Good luck.

Thanks Erinja - I wouldn't actually use the term A2 but would phrase it to be something like "Without preparation, could you tell someone the absolute basics about your family, where you live and what work you do, and ask me about mine in the language? Making mistakes is fine" or whatever way phrasing it is best.

The nature of a survey like this is that self evaluation will have to be done, so I'd rather focus on what they really can do (which will be open to less interpretation, even if some people will be needlessly modest), rather than what they think their level may be. But the nature of it all is that it will be imperfect.

@JamieD The nature of the size of the survey means I have to have as many answers ready for pre-selection such that the "other" option is selected as infrequently as possible, or ideally not there. This way, results can be graphed easier - going through up to ten thousand written answers in various languages will be too much work unfortunately. So it's unlikely I could find out that someone is an anarcho capitalist (god fearing??) atheist without making the survey too long

@sudanglo Good idea! Yes, will ask the Esperanto community to help with translations if there are a few people who can translate from that better than from English, although a several people will have to proofread the Esperanto translation to make sure there is no room for mistranslation a second time round.

I'm still travelling, but will try to sit down asap to prepare draft one of the entire survey (all drafts will just be in English; translations only requested when the final version is frozen) for people to look at and give me serious feedback on what's missing and needs to be changed.