# Connect your sources

> Which sources Middleout accepts, how each one connects and what access it needs.

Middleout **only reads** your sources: it never modifies your data. Each connection asks for the minimum read access it needs.

Sources are connected from the **Data** section of Middleout.

## Available sources

| Source | How it connects | Personal or organization |
| --- | --- | --- |
| BigQuery | You grant read-only access to Middleout's service account in your Google Cloud project, or you authorize with your Google account. | Organization with the service account; personal if you authorize with your account. |
| Google Sheets | You share the spreadsheet with your organization's account in Middleout, or you authorize with your Google account. | Either one. |
| Google Drive | You share the folder with your organization's account in Middleout, or you authorize with your Google account. | Either one. |
| GitHub | You authorize with your GitHub account and choose the repositories. Middleout studies their documentation and structure. | Personal. |
| Meetings | You upload the audio recording (MP3, M4A, WAV, WebM or OGG, up to 200 MB). | Organization. |

## Personal and organization sources

- **Personal**: only the person who connected it sees and queries it. Useful for working with your own data without sharing it.
- **Organization**: people with access can use it, and so can the work Middleout does with nobody present (alerts, scheduled updates, investigations that refresh themselves). That work never uses personal sources.

## BigQuery

There are two ways:

1. **Service account (recommended for the organization).** In the Google Cloud console for your project, you give your organization's service account in Middleout read-only roles. Middleout stores no key: access is controlled from your own IAM and you can remove it whenever you want.
2. **Your Google account.** On Google's screen you authorize the BigQuery read-only permission (`bigquery.readonly`). The source becomes personal.

Each query has a limit on the data it reads, enforced by BigQuery itself, so that a question does not become expensive.

## Google Sheets and Drive

- **For the organization**: share the spreadsheet or the folder with your organization's account in Middleout, as you would with a person. There is nothing else to authorize.
- **Personal**: authorize the Drive read-only permission (`drive.readonly`) with your Google account.

## GitHub

You authorize with your GitHub account and choose the repositories. Middleout reads their documentation (for example decisions, procedures and instruction files for agents such as `AGENTS.md` or `CLAUDE.md`) and their structure, and keeps up to date when they change. It does not run code or query the repository as a database.

## Meetings

You upload the recording and Middleout listens to it and keeps what it means: the mental models, the decisions, the learnings and the open questions.

## What happens after you connect

Middleout studies the source: it reads its tables and columns or its documents, uses the descriptions that already exist and writes the missing ones. You can review and edit those descriptions from each table's page. What it understands goes into the memory and is available in the chat, in artifacts and over MCP.