Why I’m rebuilding Niche Clever
I've never known quite how to respond when people ask me what I do. I can usually give them an answer appropriate to the circumstances. Publishing, consulting, building websites, working…
Publishing, knowledge & digital systems
Complicated work rarely starts as a neat brief.
I’m Jacob Bettany. Through Niche Clever, I work on complicated problems involving information, people, publishing, systems and technology.
I help organisations understand what they already have, make difficult information usable, and build the system, publication, workflow or software that needs to follow.
Ask Niche Clever / Interactive Professional Portfolio
Ask about the work.
The site is backed by a governed professional corpus connecting projects, chronology, evidence and current work. Ask a question to explore the record.
Start with the problem
What kind of situation are you dealing with?
Something important already exists, but nobody has the whole picture.
Recover the history, dependencies, decisions and current state well enough to see what is actually there.
Explore this routeWe have useful knowledge, but it is hard to use.
Restructure scattered content, evidence or workflows into something people can navigate, maintain and act on.
Explore this routeWe know roughly what we need. Now we need to make it.
Turn the model into a working tool, prototype, workflow or piece of software that people can actually use and maintain.
Explore this routeEvidence from the work
The projects make the practice concrete.
Different projects draw on different combinations of publishing, investigation, operations, software and information design. The case studies show what was actually done and the maturity of what exists now.
Publishing → corpus → editorial knowledge infrastructure
Cravenverse
A publishing relationship that grew into structured literary and editorial knowledge systems across books, source material and an interconnected fictional world.
Explore project and related work
Operations → digital product
Trigger SMARTS
A hotel-signage problem that became a multi-hotel operating system through three working versions shaped by real operational use.
Explore project, role and evidence
Regulated complexity → deterministic product
Lettings Compliance
A live landlord-facing product that turns date-sensitive requirements into an inspectable assessment without putting AI in the legal-truth chain.
Read the case study Visit the live checkerInteractive Professional Portfolio
Go deeper than the case studies.
This site is an edited projection from a much larger professional record. The Interactive Professional Portfolio is the governed corpus underneath it: projects, chronology, evidence, source distinctions and current work held in a form that can be explored rather than flattened into a single career story.
AskFolio is the separate reusable WordPress plugin that provides the controlled question interface.
From the work
Notes, objects and current thinking.
A short manifesto for engaging with AI
AI can give people a much greater capacity to learn, make things and help one another. It also raises serious questions about the conditions under which that capacity is created…
Thinking with machines: cognition, authority and responsibility
I have spent the last few years becoming much more capable with AI while becoming, if anything, less relaxed about it. That probably sounds contradictory, but I am not sure…