With the Las Vegas Star Trek convention less than a month away, I decided to find out just how panel hosts get the most out of the audience and their guest, all while keeping to to a strict timetable governed by ticket sales, photo ops and signing tables…

Now, standing up in front of a couple hundred people isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun time, but one of the awesome people who do it every Supanova weekend is Ben Sorensen, a sales rep turned emcee when he tried to get his gaming chairs happening at the Aussie convention a few years ago.  Fast forward to 2018 and Ben’s panels are some of the liveliest and most engaging of the weekend and I asked him how he pulls it off and what it’s like to work with the audience, the guests and the stopwatch…