FiveThirtyEight.com answered questions on what would Question Time in America look like

As you may be aware, I've teamed up with a group of about 50 other thinkers, bloggers, insiders and outsiders to help promote the idea of Question Time -- a regularly held, televised and webcasted forum in which the President would take questions from Members of the Congress, much as President Obama did with the Republican House delegation on January 29th and members of the Democratic Senate yesterday. This is truly a bipartisan endeavor, with everyone from Markos Moulitsas to Grover Norquist on board.You can sign our petition to Demand Question Time here, and follow us on twitter here.

Just a brief word about why Nate Silver signed onto this cause: "perhaps I'm an idealist, but I tend to think that the lack of open, unmediated, and honest dialog between members of Congress, between the Congress and the Executive, and between both Congress and the Executive and the public, is the greatest threat to the efficacy of our democracy today". While structural constraints like the filibuster certainly also play a large role, these structures are nothing new -- it's the ways that our political culture have evolved around them that may be more problematic. In particular, it seems to me that there is a need for conversations that are not staged, that are not reduced to 30-second soundbytes, and that are not filtered through the lens of the media. A Question Time period, if reasonably well structured, could be a significant step toward achieving that goal. Politics needn't always be zero-sum, particularly at the time when our country faces a number of threats -- from the economy, to Islamic and other forms of radicalism, to the aggregation of power by elites, to the the changing climate -- in which we will all sink or swim together. That's why you're seeing Democrats and Republicans, technocrats and populists all working together to agitate for Question Time.

Earlier today, Nate Silver was forwarded a comprehensive report on Question Time periods written by Matthew Glassman, an analyst for the Congressional Research Service, which contextualizes them relative to both the experience in parliamentary systems, of which they are a common facet, and relative to the American experience. Calls for question time periods are not new and have been proposed periodically by members of both the Executive and Legislative branches, including William Howard Taft, Walter Mondale, Estes Kefauver, and candidate John McCain among others. But, obviously, they have yet to become a regular feature of American democracy. Our hope, then, is more to make the issue a little "stickier" in the eyes of both the public and our elected officials and less to advance some specific proposal.

Nevertheless, the details of the idea may matter -- from my vantage point, for example, President Obama's session with the House Republicans, which seemed more spontaneous, was considerably more constructive than his session with the Senate Democrats, which felt more staged. Therefore, I am going to address a handful of questions that Glassman raises in his report, as well as a couple of others that are salient to the conversation. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and do not reflect an official position of the Demand Question Time coalition

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/few-questions-about-questiontime.html