Secret Life of Kites: How to Drink from the AWE Knowledge Fire-Hose
 by
Dave Santos

To every new student of AWE: Joe and I are unusual in that we have "processed" tens of thousands more domain messages than anyone else in AWE (>50k), hundreds of patents, hundreds of players, and a vast contextual history. Our secret in part is never to depend on countless fashionable digital apps and formats, although we look at them intensely, and even break them. Not bad for senior-citizens.

Young players today attach themselves like free-floating barnacles to every sort of fashionable competing digital format, OS, processor, CAD program, FEA simulation, math program, social-media platform, and so on. They then mostly burn out in self imposed third-party digital prison islands, like Facebook or LinkedIn. These powerful corporations force others to create their value. A big trap in AWE has been simplistic thinking leading to overly complex architectures doomed to fail. Such teams seemingly buy into every fad as they sink.

There are only a handful of true digital standards- Browser, Editor/Mailer, Graphics/Photos/Videos, and now, finally, Conferenceware. These are not fixed brands, which come-and-go. The one essential AWE app is the Kite itself, which is not actually digital. A fallacy is to match kite to digital product-x v. product-y. The kitegods are pilots, riggers, sewers, aerospace domain savants, and so on, anything but specifically digital-app dependent. AWE is a terrible field for coders, EEs, mathematical control theorists, and so on.

We (kPower) have the only true AWE data mountain in-hand, not LinkedIn, which fizzled in AWE a decade ago, or Slack, newly popular. Virtually everything in AWE is at our fingertips. We ransack the world for key domain knowledge and action, unrelated to any proprietary format. We are bombarded, like everyone else, to join whatever Facebook others get hooked on. Some insist closely moderated Forum Netiquette in Discourse is critical. Slack is obviously a great collaboration tool, unless few join. If the best opt out, then it sucks. To opt out of techie side-shows is to better focus on AWE essentials. When a new app emerges, let it prove its AWE value first, a chicken-and-egg hurdle. Zoom is the thing just now, but we did a CiscoWeb session yesterday, and its about just driving whatever car in the moment to go fly kites.

Joe and I know direct kite training and old fashioned literature study to be golden in AWE. That's AWE R&D as we have done it most our lives. Joe was lead-editing kite knowledge in 60s, when primitive photo-copiers were barely available, and in 2020, excellence remains what is in one's head, not dependence on the latest "bloatware." All AWE winners for 200 years put the physical kite first; its our only killer-app so far.

AWE is the sword-in-the-stone, anyone is free to try. kPower has been running years without a CEO, as it wears out large contenders long considered dominant. AWE R&D is so robust, it can run like a headless chicken if it must, and the opportunity gaps will be filled eventually. The AWE field flourishes no matter what, driven so far more by the triumph of kite-hobbies and kite-sports than digital apps.