A friend that serves; a friend that does not control.Shamwari means friend in Shona. It is the community pillar of the Bundu Ecosystem, and it is a companion rather than a chatbot: it is meant to know things about your life, which is exactly why the rules about where your data can go are the most important thing on this site.
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Two constraints shape every other decision, and they are the two worth reading before anything else:- The two rules — personal data never reaches a third-party model, and only open-weight output may train Shamwari Mind. Both are enforced in code in more than one place.
- Data scopes — the distinction that matters in Shamwari is not how much you pay. It is whose data a question is about.
- Architecture — two services, drawn along one line.
- Routing and models — which model answers, and why the provenance of the answer is recorded at the moment it is generated.
- Ground and citation — how an answer about Zimbabwean law gets a section number attached to it.
- How we describe it — the words we use, and the ones we refuse to, because the difference is load-bearing.