Introduction

Golavo is a local-first, open-source football forecasting project. It implements reproducible sealing and scoring for men’s senior full internationals (a forward seal→score loop with a real calibration record), backtests the top-5 European leagues, exposes competition-local analytics and honest outlook gates, ships an optional off-by-default AI narration layer, and builds an unsigned desktop app. A hash-chained multi-artifact ledger and confirmed-lineup / BYOK data adapters remain planned (ADR-0001).

What Golavo is

• A forward forecast pipeline: sealed pre-kickoff JSON artifacts are replayable and never mutated when scored.
• A provenance-first engine: each artifact records the pinned source snapshot and content hashes.
• A local source-mode core, API, and desktop app, with an optional AI layer that is off by default. A built-in Ollama guide can install and assign recommended Fast/Deep models with visible progress; the deterministic fact engine (the Commentator’s Notebook) remains useful without AI. The hash-chained multi-artifact ledger remains planned (ADR-0001).

What Golavo is not

• Not a livescore app — open-core results are delayed.
• Not a betting tool — no odds, picks, “locks,” bankroll advice, or affiliate links.
• Not an AI predictor — the statistical engine owns every probability.
• Not a restricted-feed redistributor — every bundled pack has a verified open-data license and isolated attribution boundary; proprietary-feed adapters would remain bring-your-own-key and never be re-shared.

Product principles

1. The statistical engine owns every probability.
2. Every displayed fact has a source id, or it doesn’t ship.
3. Missing data is a first-class state, never silently interpolated.
4. AI explains, researches, and proposes typed facts — it never edits numbers.
5. Coincidence is not evidence, and the UI says which is which.
6. Local by default; network access is opt-in and visible.
7. No betting surface, ever.

The words we use carefully

Term	What it means in Golavo
Local	All computation runs on your machine over data already synced to disk. Staleness is always shown.
Offline	Forecasting and API reads work from the vendored snapshot; rebuilding a sourcepack requires network access.
AI	Implemented and off by default. Its contract permits cited narrative, never probability ownership; it cannot change or improve a number.
Open	The code is Apache-2.0; data packs declare their own license. Match-result packs are CC0-1.0, enrichment/research packs retain CC-BY attribution, and CC-BY-SA facts stay isolated.
Free	No payment to Golavo, ever. Optional third-party keys/AI are paid by you, to those providers.
Live	Golavo is not live. It uses pinned snapshots and records their retrieval time.