I personally trust the judgement of the moderators, and would not want to prevent them from having some preliminary stage-setting discussions with other parties in private if they felt that that was appropriate. Obviously any actual change in policy will need to be discussed openly here. Anecdotally, it seems that there is a substantial class of potentially valuable contributors who feel that the basic framework of MathOverflow is unwelcoming. Whether or not you agree with that, it seems suboptimal to force them to use the same framework for even the earliest stages of a discussion of their concerns.