On 24th March 2019, a meeting of experts in bioinformatics and public health was convened at the Head office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, USA. At this meeting there was agreement that access to flexible, sustainable bioinformatics capacity is a critical need for public health laboratories throughout the world as pathogen sequencing becomes more routine. The landmark Seattle Agreement concluded that a global initiative was needed to champion the development of open source, reproducible bioinformatics, and to support the development of bioinformatic and data standards, architectures and methods for public health.