Every forum needs someone to hold the shape of the meeting. That person is the moderator. The role is smaller than it looks from outside and harder than it looks from inside, and most of the difficulty is not the part people expect.
Here is the work.
Before the meeting
You set the agenda and you confirm who is presenting. Allow an hour, more the first few times, less once you have a rhythm. The agenda is rarely the hard part. Getting a commitment from the next presenter sometimes is.
Scheduling, reminders and the room belong to the roles, not to you. So does the parking lot of topics the group wants to return to. If you are doing those yourself, the roles are not filled.
In the meeting
You open and you close. You watch the clock without being ruled by it. You make the small interventions that keep the container intact: bringing the group back when it drifts, naming the advice impulse when it shows up, protecting the quiet member's airtime.
Timekeeping itself belongs to the timekeeper. Your job is the judgment underneath it. If someone is in the middle of something real, you do not cut them off because a slot ended.
After the meeting
Very little, if the roles are working. A short note to the next presenter. A few minutes of your own reflection, which almost nobody does and which is the single highest-return habit in the job.
The part nobody writes down
You will be the person who notices that something is off before anyone says so. You will hold a disagreement without resolving it. Once or twice a year someone will bring something into the room that changes the temperature, and everyone will look at you, and the right move will be to say almost nothing.
That is the real work. It is not a skill you arrive with. It is a skill the role builds, in the order it builds it, and there is a map of that in the Skill Pathway.
What the group carries
Leadership in a forum is distributed. A steady group survives a mediocre moderator without much trouble. A group that has not agreed on its rules will strain a good one. That is why the constitution comes first, and why filling the roles matters more than any quality you personally bring.