The 'area' returned from the AreaGroup.objects is itself a foreign key,

which means we need to look up area_acronym, but that's also a foreign
key, so again we look up the value we want: acronym.  Simply doing
dictsort in the template on area would sort on the FK, I assume --
at least it didn't resolve things to 3 levels, each time looking up the
key we were interested in...
 - Legacy-Id: 151

ietf/proceedings/models.py

@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 from django.db import models
 from ietf.idtracker.models import Acronym, PersonOrOrgInfo, IRTF, AreaGroup, GroupIETF
 import datetime
+from ietf.utils import log
 
 # group_acronym is either an IETF Acronym
 #  or an IRTF one, depending on the value of irtf.
@@ -35,14 +36,17 @@ class ResolveAcronym(object):
         return acronym_name
     def area(self):
         try:
-            interim = self.interim
+            irtf = self.irtf
         except AttributeError:
-            interim = False
-        if self.irtf:
+            irtf = False
+        if irtf:
             area = "IRTF"
         else:
-            area = AreaGroup.objects.get(group=self.group_acronym_id).area
-        return area 
+            try:
+                area = AreaGroup.objects.get(group=self.group_acronym_id).area.area_acronym.acronym
+            except:
+                area = "???"
+        return area
 
 class Meeting(models.Model):
     meeting_num = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)