Introduction

Golavo is a local-first, open-source football forecasting project. It implements reproducible sealing and scoring for men’s senior full internationals and certified domestic fixtures, backtests the top-5 European leagues, exposes a compact deterministic Match Study Desk, competition-local analytics, honest outlook gates, and a separate women-first World Cup history archive, ships optional off-by-default AI narration plus BYOK Sportmonks outside-signal and bounded Transfer Desk panels, and builds an OS-unsigned desktop app whose updater and active data-pack manifests are authenticated. The local integrity workbench also has hash-chained ledger checkpoints, backward-compatible chain continuation, and a disposable recovery drill with explicit limits; optional external anchoring and any player-data model-input adapter remain gated.

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, and can export a portable offline-verifiable lineage proof.
• 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.
• A local integrity workbench: proof inspection, an allowlisted ledger archive/restore path with checkpoint recovery rehearsal, application receipts, and checkpoints that detect changes relative to earlier local heads without claiming external authenticity or timing.

Release boundary

v0.19.0 is the published stable desktop milestone described here. Provider-backed panels still require the user’s own account, token, entitlement, and foreground fetch. Trust Center restore or checkpoint creation specifically requires the installed desktop app’s private launch token.

What Golavo is not

• Not a livescore app — open-core results are delayed.
• Not a betting tool — deterministic probabilities and optional provider odds are study context only. There is no ranked wager, expected-value comparison, bet placement, bookmaker/affiliate link, “value,” staking, “locks,” or bankroll advice.
• 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 workflow: mathematical equivalents and outside odds/predictions stay unranked, attributed, opt-in, and structurally separate from Golavo forecasts.

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 a livescore service. Core forecasts use pinned snapshots; optional outside signals are fetched only after a foreground click and show their capture time.