This looks pretty interesting. I have a few question about how it's practically working out.
I get the impression that the values of the votes are configurable? So you've chosen -1, +1, and +2, but you could have chosen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (for example)?
Yes, I believe so. Maybe someone more familiar with how this works in Gerrit can correct me if I'm misstating that.
Do you have an example of a dashboard that's using these values?
Being able to easily query and create a dashboard for this is the big benefit. Here's what I came up with for Cinder: https://tiny.cc/CinderPriorities
IMO, gerrit's display of votes is rather bad. I'd prefer that votes like this could be aggregated. How do you manage discovering what patches are priority or not? I guess that's where the dashboards come in?
We haven't been aggregating votes, rather just a core can decide to flag things are priority or not.
I get the impression that particular priority votes have the ability to block a merge. How does that work?
I believe this is what controls that: http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/project-config/tree/gerrit/acl... So I believe that could be NoBlock or NoOp to allow just ranking without enforcing any kind of blocking.